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THE CHIEF 
AMERICAN PROSE WRITERS 

^elected ptm 

BY 

FRANKLIN, IRVING, COOPER, POE 

HAWTHORNE, EMERSON, THOREAU 

LOWELL AND HOLMES 



EDITED BY 

NORMAN FOERSTER 

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA 




BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
Cbe Btoeretoe fljrcss Camf>rtog;e 






COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY NORMAN FOERSTER 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



#*#A11 rights on selections in this volume from Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, 
Lowell, and Holmes are reserved by Houghton Mifflin Company who are the pro- 
prietors, either in their own right or as agents for the authors, of the works repre- 
sented. 




tEfte &ibergfte freest 

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



►CI.A445557 



PREFACE 

The nine writers represented in this volume have become, 
by general consent, the American prose classics. Others, such 
as Brockden Brown, Bret Harte, Whitman, Prescott, Mark 
Twain, and Mr. Howells, to name but a few among many who 
have achieved high distinction, are not far below the unques- 
tioned nine; perhaps some of them will, as time goes on, dis- 
place certain of the elect. Yet, if all of these candidates had 
been accepted, this collection of prose might not have deserved 
the word "Chief" in its title; and if some had been accepted 
and others rejected, I could hardly have been other than 
arbitrary and tentative. As it stands, however, the book may 
pretend to a certain finality. 

My first object has been to bring together in one volume lib- 
eral illustrations of the best work of these nine American prose 
classics. 

My second object has been to bring together sufficient 
examples of the characteristic work of these authors to give in 
each case a well-rounded view. 

My third object has been to bring together important essays, 
letters, etc., that are at present altogether or virtually inacces- 
sible in textbooks; instances are Emerson's "Divinity School 
Address," Thoreau's "Journal" and "Life Without Principle," 
and Lowell's "Letters" and "Dante." The thirty-eight selec- 
tions that constitute the book represent a score or more of 
separate volumes. 

All of the selections, with the exception of half a dozen, are 
unabridged. Of the exceptions^two — Franklin's Autobiog- 
raphy and Holmes's Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table — are 
abridged at one end only, and a third, the chapters from The 
Last of the Mohicans, is an engrossing episode that loses little 
when read in isolation. It is assumed, however, that the in- 
structor will prefer to assign all of this novel, using the selec- 
tion for detailed discussion in the classroom. 

The notes were prepared in the expectation that the student 



iv PREFACE 

would have at hand a copy of either Webster's Secondary-School 
Dictionary or the Desk Standard Dictionary. In general, I have 
explained only allusions left unexplained in these admirable 
dictionaries. 

JNORMAN FOERSTER 
University of North Carolina 
May 31, 1916 



CONTENTS 

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

Autobiography . i 

WASHINGTON IRVING 

Peter the Headstrong 38 

The Author's Account op Himselp 54 

Westminster Abbey 56 

Christmas Eve 66 

Rip Van Winkle 77 

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 

The Chase 95 

EDGAR ALLAN POE 

The Poetic Principle 131 

Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales 152 

Shadow 159 

The Masque of the Red Death 162 

The Cask op Amontillado 168 

The Purloined Letter 174 

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

The Wedding Knell 193 

The Maypole of Merry Mount 201 

The Old Manse 212 

Young Goodman Brown 238 

Roger Malvin's Burial 251 

Rappaccini's Daughter 270 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Nature 301 

The American Scholar 311 

Divinity School Address 329 

The Over-Soul 347 

Self-Reliance 363 

Compensation 387 

Love 405 

Napoleon; Or, The Man of the World 416 



vi CONTENTS 

HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For 435 

Solitude 449 

Conclusion oe Walden 457 

Life Without Principle 468 

Extracts from the Journal 487 

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

Letters 495 

Emerson the Lecturer 506 

Thoreau 514 

Dante 528 

Democracy . ... . . 548 

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

The Autocrat oe the Breakfast-Table 569 

READING LISTS 621 



CHIEF AMERICAN PROSE WRITERS 



THE CHIEF 
AMERICAN PROSE WRITERS 

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 1 

Dear Son: I have ever had pleasure in obtaining any little 
anecdotes of my ancestors. You may remember the inquiries 
I made among the remains of my relations when you were with 
me in England, and the journey I undertook for that purpose. 
Imagining it may be equally agreeable to you to know the cir- 
cumstances of my life, many of which you are yet unacquainted 
with, and expecting the enjoyment of a week's uninterrupted 
leisure in my present country retirement, I sit down to write 
them for you. To which I have besides some other induce- 
ments. Having emerged from the poverty and obscurity in 
which I was born and bred to a state of affluence and some 
degree of reputation in the world, and having gone so far 
through life with a considerable share of felicity, the conducing 
means I made use of, which with the blessing of God so well 
succeeded, my posterity may like to know, as they may find 
some of them suitable to their own situations, and therefore 
fit to be imitated. 

That felicity, when I reflected on it, has induced me some- 
times to say, that were it offered to my choice, I should have 
no objection to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, 
only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to 
correct some faults of the first. So I might, besides correcting 

1 The excerpt here printed comprises approximately the first half of the first 
section of the Autobiography — the section that Franklin wrote in 1771 while in 
England on a political mission. Unlike the rest of the book, the first part was 
intended mainly, if not solely, for the pleasure and use of his family, rather than 
for a curious public. His son, William Franklin, whom he specifically addresses, 
had been with him in England, as the second sentence indicates, but was now in 
America as Governor of New Jersey. In the Revolutionary War, he was a roy- 
alist, and as such an enemy of his father. In 1784, however, a partial reconcilia- 
tion took place. 



2 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

the faults, change some sinister accidents and events of it for 
others more favorable. But though this were denied, I should 
still accept the offer. Since such a repetition is not to be ex- 
pected, the next thing most like living one's life over again 
seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollec- 
tion as durable as possible by putting it down in writing. 

Hereby, too, I shall indulge the inclination so natural in old 
men, to be talking of themselves and their own past actions; 
and I shall indulge it without being tiresome to others, who, 
through respect to age, might conceive themselves obliged to 
give me a hearing, since this may be read or not as any one 
pleases. And, lastly (I may as well confess it, since my denial 
of it will be believed by nobody), perhaps I shall a good deal 
gratify my own vanity. Indeed, I scarce ever heard or saw the 
introductory words, "Without vanity I may say" etc., but some 
vain thing immediately followed. Most people dislike vanity 
in others, whatever share they have of it themselves ; but I give 
it fair quarter wherever I meet with it, being persuaded that it 
is often productive of good to the possessor, and to others that 
are within his sphere of action; and therefore, in many cases, 
it would not be altogether absurd if a man were to thank God 
for his vanity among the other comforts of life. 

And now I speak of thanking God, I desire with all humility 
to acknowledge that I owe the mentioned happiness of my past 
life to his kind providence, which led me to the means I used 
and gave them success. My belief of this induces me to hope, 
though I must not presume, that the same goodness will still 
be exercised toward me, in Continuing that happiness, or ena- 
bling me to bear a fatal reverse, which I may experience as 
others have done; the complexion of my future fortune being 
known to Him only in whose power it is to bless to us even our 
afflictions. 

The notes one of my uncles (who had the same kind of curi- 
osity in collecting family anecdotes) once put into my hands 
furnished me with several particulars relating to our ancestors. 
From these notes I learned that the family had lived in the 
same village, Ecton, in Northamptonshire, for three hundred 
years, and how much longer he knew not (perhaps from the 
time when the name of Franklin, that before was the name of 
an order of people, was assumed by them as a surname when 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY 3 

others took surnames all over the kingdom), on a freehold of 
about thirty acres, aided by the smith's business, which had 
continued in the family till his time, the eldest son being 
always bred to that business; a custom which he and my father 
followed as to their eldest sons. When I searched the registers 
at Ecton, I found an account of their births, marriages, and 
burials from the year 1555 only, there being no registers kept 
in that parish at any time preceding. By that register I per- 
ceived that I was the youngest son of the youngest son for five 
generations back. My grandfather, Thomas, who was born in 
1598, lived at Ecton till he grew too old to follow business 
longer, when he went to live with his son John, a dyer at Ban- 
bury, in Oxfordshire, with whom my father served an appren- 
ticeship. There my grandfather died and lies buried. We saw 
his gravestone in 1758. His eldest son Thomas lived in the 
house at Ecton, and left it with the land to his only child, a 
daughter, who, with her husband, one Fisher, of Welling- 
borough, sold it to Mr. Isted, now lord of the manor there. 
My grandfather had four sons that grew up, viz.: Thomas, 
John, Benjamin, and Josiah. I will give you what account I 
can of them, at this distance from my papers, and if these are 
not lost in my absence, you will among them find many more 
particulars. 

Thomas was bred a smith under his father; but, being in- 
genious, and encouraged in learning (as all my brothers were) 
by an Esquire Palmer, then the principal gentleman in that 
parish, he qualified himself for the business of scrivener; be- 
came a considerable man in the county; was a chief mover of 
all public-spirited undertakings for the county or town of 
Northampton, and his own village, of which many instances 
were related of him; and much taken notice of and patronized 
by the then Lord Halifax. He died in 1702, January 6, old 
style, just four years to a day before I was born. The account 
we received of his life and character from some old people at 
Ecton, I remember, struck you as something extraordinary, 
from its similarity to what you knew of mine. "Had he died on 
the same day," you said, "one might have supposed a trans- 
migration." 

John was bred a dyer, I believe of woolens. Benjamin was 
bred a silk dyer, serving an apprenticeship at London. He was 



4 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

an ingenious man. I remember him well, for when I was a boy- 
he came over to my father in Boston, and lived in the house 
with us some years. He lived to a great age. His grandson, 
Samuel Franklin, now lives in Boston. He left behind him two 
quarto volumes, MS., of his own poetry, consisting of little 
occasional pieces addressed to his friends and relations, of 
which the following, sent to me, is a specimen. 1 He had formed 
a short-hand of his own, which he taught me, but, never prac- 
ticing it, I have now forgot it. I was named after this uncle, 
there being a particular affection between him and my father. 
He was very pious, a great attender of sermons of the best 
preachers, which he took down in his short-hand, and had with 
him many volumes of them. He was also much of a politician; 
too much, perhaps, for his station. There fell lately into my 
hands, in London, a collection he had made of all the principal 
pamphlets relating to public affairs, from 1641 to 171 7; many 
of the volumes are wanting as appears by the numbering, but 
there still remain eight volumes in folio, and twenty-four in 
quarto and in octavo. A dealer in old books met with them, 
and knowing me by my sometimes buying of him, he brought 
them to me. It seems my uncle must have left them here when 
he went to America, which was above fifty years since. There 
are many of his notes in the margins. 

This obscure family of ours was early in the Reformation, 
and continued Protestants through the reign of Queen Mary, 
when they were sometimes in danger of trouble on account of 
their zeal against popery. They had got an English Bible, and 
to conceal and secure it, it was fastened open with tapes under 
and within the cover of a joint-stool. When my great-great- 
grandfather read it to his family, he turned up the joint-stool 
upon his knees, turning over the leaves then under the tapes. 
One of the children stood at the door to give notice if he saw 
the apparitor coming, who was an officer of the spiritual court. 
In that case the stool was turned down again upon its feet, 
when the Bible remained concealed under it as before. This 
anecdote I had from my uncle Benjamin. The family continued 
all of the Church of England till about the end of Charles the 
Second's reign, when some of the ministers that had been outed 
for non-conformity holding conventicles in Northamptonshire, 
1 Lacking in the MS. 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY 5 

Benjamin and Josiah adhered to them, and so continued all their 
lives : the rest of the family remained with the Episcopal Church. 
Josiah, my father, married young, and carried his wife with 
three children into New England, about 1682. The conventicles 
having been forbidden by law, and frequently disturbed, in- 
duced some considerable men of his acquaintance to remove to 
that country, and he was prevailed with to accompany them 
thither, where they expected to enjoy their mode of religion 
with freedom. By the same wife he had four children more born 
there, and by a second wife ten more, in all seventeen ; of which 
I remember thirteen sitting at one time at his table, who all 
grew up to be men and women, and married ; I was the young- 
est son, and the youngest child but two, and was born in Boston, 
New England. My mother, the second wife, was Abiah 
Folger, daughter of Peter Folger, one of the first settlers of 
New England, of whom honorable mention is made by Cotton 
Mather, in his church history of that country, entitled Mag- 
nalia Christi Americana, as "a godly, learned Englishman" if I 
remember the words rightly. I have heard that he wrote sun- 
dry small occasional pieces, but only one of them was printed, 
which I saw now many years since. It was written in 1675, in 
the homespun verse of that time and people, and addressed to 
those then concerned in the government there. It was in favor 
of liberty of conscience, and in behalf of the Baptists, Quakers, 
and other sectaries that had been under persecution, ascribing 
the Indian wars, and other distresses that had befallen the 
country, to that persecution, as so many judgments of God to 
punish so heinous an offense, and exhorting a repeal of those 
uncharitable laws. The whole appeared to me as written with 
a good deal of decent plainness and manly freedom. The six 
concluding lines I remember, though I have forgotten the two 
first of the stanza; but the purport of them was, that his cen- 
sures proceeded from good-will, and therefore he would be 
known to be the author. 

"Because to be a libeller (says he) 
I hate it with my heart; 
From Sherburne l town, where now I dwell 

My name I do put here ; 
Without offense your real friend, 
It is Peter Folgier." 

1 Nantucket, Massachusetts. 



6 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

My elder brothers were all put apprentices to different 
trades. I was put to the grammar-school at eight years of age, 
my father intending to devote me, as the tithe of his sons, to 
the service of the Church. My early readiness in learning to 
read (which must have been very early, as I do not remember 
when I could not read), and the opinion of all his friends that I 
should certainly make a good scholar, encouraged him in this 
purpose of his. My uncle Benjamin, too, approved of it, and 
proposed to give me all his short-hand volumes of sermons, I 
suppose, as a stock to set up with, if I would learn his character. 
I continued, however, at the grammar-school 1 not quite one 
year, though in that time I had risen gradually from the middle 
of the class of that year to be the head of it, and farther was 
removed into the next class above it, in order to go with that 
into the third at the end of the year. But my father, in the 
mean time, from a view of the expense of a college education, 
which having so large a family he could not well afford, and 
the mean living many so educated were afterwards able to ob-^ 
tain, — reasons that he gave to his friends in my hearing, — 
altered his first intention, took me from the grammar-school, 
and sent me to a school for writing and arithmetic, kept by a 
then famous man, Mr. George Brownell, very successful in his 
profession generally, and that by mild, encouraging methods. 
Under him I acquired fair writing pretty soon, but I failed in 
the arithmetic, and made no progress in it. At ten years old I 
was taken home to assist my father in his business, which was 
that of a tallow-chandler and soap-boiler; a business he was 
not bred to, but had assumed on his arrival in New England, 
and on finding his dyeing trade would not maintain his family, 
being in little request. Accordingly, I was employed in cutting 
wick for the candles, filling the dipping mould and the moulds 
for cast candles, attending the shop, going of errands, etc. 

I disliked the trade, and had a strong inclination for the sea, 
but my father declared against it; however, living near the 
water, I was much in and about it, learnt early to swim well, 
and to manage boats; and when in a boat or canoe with other 
boys, I was commonly allowed to govern, especially in any 
case of difficulty; and upon other occasions I was generally a 

1 At that time, a school where Latin was taught, and as such suited to the 
needs of prospective college students. 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY 7 

leader among the boys, and sometimes led them into scrapes, 
of which I will mention one instance, as it shows an early pro- 
jecting public spirit, though not then justly conducted. 

There was a salt marsh that bounded part of the mill pond, 
on the edge of which, at high water, we used to stand to fish for 
minnows. By much trampling, we had made it a mere quag- 
mire. My proposal was to build a wharf there fit for us to 
stand upon, and I showed my comrades a large heap of stones, 
which were intended for a new house near the marsh, and 
which would very well suit our purpose. Accordingly, in the 
evening, when the workmen were gone, I assembled a number 
of my playfellows, and working with them diligently, like so 
many emmets, sometimes two or three to a stone, we brought 
them all away and built our little wharf. The next morning 
the workmen were surprised at missing the stones, which were 
found in our wharf. Inquiry was made after the removers; we 
were discovered and complained of ; several of us were corrected 
by our fathers; and, though I pleaded the usefulness of the 
work, mine convinced me that nothing was useful which was 
not honest. 

I think you may like to know something of his person and 
character. He had an excellent constitution of body, was of 
middle stature, but well set, and very strong; he was ingenious, 
could draw prettily, was skilled a little in music, and had a 
clear, pleasing voice, so that when he played psalm tunes on 
his violin and sung withal, as he sometimes did in an evening 
after the business of the day was over, it was extremely agree- 
able to hear. He had a mechanical genius, too, and, on occa- 
sion, was very handy in the use of other tradesmen's tools; but 
his great excellence lay in a sound understanding and solid 
judgment in prudential matters, both in private and public 
affairs. In the latter, indeed, he was never employed, the nu- 
merous family he had to educate and the straitness of his circum- 
stances keeping him close to his trade; but I remember well his 
being frequently visited by leading people, who consulted him 
for his opinion in affairs of the town or of the church he be- 
longed to, and showed a good deal of respect for his judgment 
and advice; he was also much consulted by private persons 
about their affairs when any difficulty occurred, and frequently 
chosen an arbitrator between contending parties. At his table 



8 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

he liked to have, as often as he could, some sensible friend or 
neighbor to converse with, and always took care to start some 
ingenious or useful topic for discourse, which might tend to im- 
prove the minds of his children. By this means he turned our 
attention to what was good, just, and prudent in the conduct 
of life ; and little or no notice was ever taken of what related to 
the victuals on the table, whether it was well or ill dressed, in 
or out of season, of good or bad flavor, preferable or inferior to 
this or that other thing of the kind, so that I was brought up 
in such a perfect inattention to those matters as to be quite 
indifferent what kind of food was set before me, and so unob- 
servant of it, that to this day if I am asked I can scarce tell a 
few hours after dinner what I dined upon. This has been a con- 
venience to me in traveling, where my companions have been 
sometimes very unhappy for want of a suitable gratification 
of their more delicate, because better instructed, tastes and 
appetites. 

My mother had likewise an excellent constitution; she suckled 
all her ten children. I never knew either my father or mother to 
have any sickness but that of which they died, he at eighty- 
nine, and she at eighty-five years of age. They lie buried to- 
gether at Boston, where I some years since placed a marble 
over their grave, with this inscription: — 

Josiah Franklin, 

and 

Abiah his wife, 

lie here interred. 

They lived lovingly together in wedlock 

fifty-five years. 

Without an estate, or any gainful employment, 

By constant labor and industry, 

with God's blessing, 
They maintained a large family 

comfortably, 

and brought up thirteen children 

and seven grandchildren 

reputably. 

From this instance, reader, 

Be encouraged to diligence in thy calling, 

And distrust not Providence. 

He was a pious and prudent man; 

She, a discreet and virtuous woman. 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY 9 

Their youngest son, 

In filial regard to their memory, 

' Places this stone. 

J. F. born 1655, died 1744, ^Etat 89. 

A. F. born 1667, died 1752, 85. 

By my rambling digressions I perceive myself to be grown 
old. I used to write more methodically. But one does not 
dress for private company as for a public ball. 'T is perhaps 
only negligence. 

To return: I continued thus employed in my father's busi- 
ness for two years, that is, till I was twelve years old; and my 
brother John, who was bred to that business, having left my 
father, married, and set up for himself at Rhode Island, there 
was all appearance that I was destined to supply his place, and 
become a tallow-chandler. But my dislike to the trade contin- 
uing, my father was under apprehensions that if he did not 
find one for me more agreeable, I should break away and get 
to sea, as his son Josiah had done, to his great vexation. He 
therefore sometimes took me to walk with him, and see joiners, 
bricklayers, turners, braziers, etc., at their work, that he might 
observe my inclination, and endeavor to fix it on some trade or 
other on land. It has ever since been a pleasure to me to see 
good workmen handle their tools, and it has been useful to me, 
having learned so much by it as to be able to do little jobs 
myself in my house when a workman could not readily be got, 
and to construct little machines for my experiments, while the 
intention of making the experiment was fresh and warm in my 
mind. My father at last fixed upon the cutler's trade, and my 
uncle Benjamin's son Samuel, who was bred to that business in 
London, being about that time established in Boston, I was 
sent to be with him some time on liking. But his expecta- 
tions of a fee with me displeasing my father, I was taken home 
again. 

From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money 
that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased 
with the Pilgrim's Progress, my first collection was .of John 
Bunyan's works in separate little volumes. I afterward sold 
them to enable me to buy R. Burton's Historical Collections; 
they were small chapmen's books, and cheap, forty or fifty in 
all. My father's little library consisted chiefly of books in 



io BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

polemic divinity, most of which I read, and have since often 
regretted that, at a time when I had such a thirst for knowl- 
edge, more proper books had not fallen in my way, since it was 
now resolved I should not be a clergyman. Plutarch's Lives 
there was in which I read abundantly, and I still think that 
time spent to great advantage. There was also a book of De 
Foe's, called an Essay on Projects, and another of Dr. Mather's, 1 
called Essays to do Good, which perhaps gave me a turn of 
thinking that had an influence on some of the principal future 
events of my life. 

This bookish inclination at length determined my father to 
make me a printer, though he had already one son (James) of 
that profession. In 17 17 my brother James returned from 
England with a press and letters to set up his business in Boston. 
I liked it much better than that of my father, but still had a 
hankering for the sea. To prevent the apprehended effect of 
such an inclination, my father was impatient to have me 
bound to my brother. I stood out some time, but at last was 
persuaded, and signed the indentures when I was yet but 
twelve years old. I was to serve as an apprentice till I was 
twenty-one years of age, only I was to be allowed journeyman's 
wages during the last year. In a little time I made great pro- 
ficiency in the business, and became a useful hand to my 
brother. I now had access to better books. An acquaintance 
with the apprentices of booksellers enabled me sometimes to 
borrow a small one, which I was careful to return soon and 
clean. Often I sat up in my room reading the greatest part of 
the night, when the book was borrowed in the evening and to 
be returned early in the morning, lest it should be missed or . 
wanted. 

And after some time an ingenious tradesman, Mr. Matthew 
Adams, who had a pretty collection of books, and who fre- 
quented our printing-house, took notice of me, invited me to 
his library, and very kindly lent me such books as I chose to 
read. I now took a fancy to poetry, and made some little pieces ; 
my brother, thinking it might turn to account, encouraged me, 
and put me on composing occasional ballads. One was called 
The Lighthouse Tragedy, and contained an account of the 
drowning of Captain Worthilake, with his two daughters; the 
1 Cotton Mather's. 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY n 

other was a sailor's song, on the taking of Teach (or Black- 
beard), the pirate. They were wretched stuff, in the Grub 
Street ballad style; and when they were printed he sent me 
about the town to sell them. The first sold wonderfully, the 
event being recent, having made a great noise. This flattered 
my vanity; but my father discouraged me by ridiculing my 
performances, and telling me verse-makers were generally beg- 
gars. So I escaped being a poet, most probably a very bad one ; 
but as prose writing has been of great use to me in the course of 
my life, and was a principal means of my advancement, I shall 
tell you how, in such a situation, I acquired what little ability 
I have in that way. 

There was another bookish lad in the town, John Collins by 
name, with whom I was intimately acquainted. We sometimes 
disputed, and very fond we were of argument, and very desir- 
ous of confuting one another, which disputatious turn, by the 
way, is apt to become a very bad habit, making people often 
extremely disagreeable in company by the contradiction that 
is necessary to bring it into practice; and thence, besides sour- 
ing and spoiling the conversation, is productive of disgusts and 
perhaps enmities where you may have occasion for friendship. 
I had caught it by reading my father's books of dispute about 
religion. Persons of good sense, I have since observed, seldom 
fall into it, except lawyers, university men, and men of all sorts 
that have been bred at Edinburgh. 

A question was once, somehow or other, started between 
Collins and me, of the propriety of educating the female sex in 
learning, and their abilities for study. He was of opinion that 
it was improper, and that they were naturally unequal to it. 
I took the contrary side, perhaps a little for dispute's sake. He 
was naturally more eloquent, had a ready plenty of words; and 
sometimes, as I thought, bore me down more by his fluency 
than by the strength of his reasons. As we parted without set- 
tling the point, and were not to see one another again for some 
time, I sat down to put my arguments in writing, which I 
copied fair and sent to him. He answered, and I replied. Three 
or four letters of a side had passed, when my father happened 
to find my papers and read them. Without entering into the 
discussion, he took occasion to talk to me about the manner 
of my writing; observed that, though I had the advantage of 



12 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

my antagonist in correct spelling and pointing 1 (which I owed 
to the printing-house), I fell far short in elegance of expression, 
in method, and in perspicuity, of which he convinced me by 
several instances. I saw the justice of his remarks, and thence 
grew more attentive to the manner in writing, and determined 
to endeavor at improvement. 

About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator. 
It was the third. I had never before seen any of them. I 
bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with 
it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to 
imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and mak- 
ing short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by 
a few days, and then, without looking at the book, tried to com- 
plete the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at 
length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suit- 
able words that should come to hand. Then I compared my 
Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and 
corrected them. But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a 
readiness in recollecting and using them, which I thought I 
should have acquired before that time if I had gone on making 
verses; since the continual occasion for words of the same im- 
port, but of different length, to suit the measure, or of different 
sound for the rhyme, would have laid me under a constant 
necessity of searching for variety, and also have tended to fix 
that variety in my mind, and make me master of it. Therefore 
I took some of the tales and turned them into verse; and, after 
a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them 
back again. I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints 
into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce 
them into the best order, before I began to form the full sen- 
tences and complete the paper. This was to teach me method 
in the arrangement of thoughts. By comparing my work after- 
wards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended 
them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in 
certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to 
improve the method or the language, and this encouraged me 
to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English 
writer, of which I was extremely ambitious. My time for these 
exercises and for reading was at night, after work, or before it 

1 Punctuation. 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY 13 

began in the morning, or on Sundays, when I contrived to be 
in the printing-house alone, evading as much as I could the 
common attendance on public worship which my father used 
to exact of me when I was under his care, and which indeed I 
still thought a duty, though I could not, as it seemed to me, 
afford time to practice it. 

When about sixteen years of age I happened to meet with a 
book, written by one Tryon, recommending a vegetable diet. 
I determined to go into it. My brother, being yet unmarried, 
did not keep house, but boarded himself and his apprentices in 
another family. My refusing to eat flesh occasioned an incon- 
veniency, and I was frequently chid for my singularity. I 
made myself acquainted with Tryon's manner of preparing 
some of his dishes, such as boiling potatoes or rice, making 
hasty pudding, and a few others, and then proposed to my 
brother that if he would give me, weekly, half the money he 
paid for my board, I would board myself. He instantly agreed 
to it and I presently found that I could save half what he paid 
me. This was an additional fund for buying books. But I had 
another advantage in it. My brother and the rest going from 
the printing-house to their meals, I remained there alone, and 
dispatching presently my light repast, which often was no more 
than a biscuit or a slice of bread, a handful of raisins or a tart 
from the pastry-cook's, and a glass of water, had the rest of the 
time till their return for study, in which I made the greater 
progress, from that greater clearness of head and quicker 
apprehension which usually attend temperance in eating and 
drinking. 

And now it was that, being on some occasion made ashamed 
of my ignorance in figures, which I had twice failed in learning 
when at school, I took Cocker's book of Arithmetic, and went 
through the whole by myself with great ease. I also read 
Seller's and Shermy's books of Navigation, and became ac- 
quainted with the little geometry they contain ; but never pro- 
ceeded far in that science. And I read about this time Locke 
On Human Understanding, and the Art of Thinking, by Messrs. 
du Port Royal. 

While I was intent on improving my language, I met with 
an English Grammar (I think it was Greenwood's), at the end 
of which there were two little sketches of the arts of rhetoric 



i 4 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

and logic, the latter finishing with a specimen of a dispute in 
the Socratic method; and soon after I procured Xenophon's 
Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances 
of the same method. I was charmed with it, adopted it, dropped 
my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put 
on the humble inquirer and doubter. And being then, from 
reading Shaftesbury and Collins, 1 become a real doubter in 
many points of our religious doctrine, I found this method 
safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom 
I used it; therefore I took a delight in it, practiced it continu- 
ally, and grew very artful and expert in drawing people, even 
of superior knowledge, into concessions, the consequences of 
which they did not foresee, entangling them in difficulties out 
of which they could not extricate themselves, and so obtaining 
victories that neither myself nor my cause always deserved. 
I continued this method some few years, but gradually left it, 
retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest 
diffidence; never using, when I advanced anything that may 
possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any 
others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather 
say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears 
to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or 
/ imagine it to be so; or it is so if I am not mistaken. This habit, 
I believe, has been of great advantage to me when I have had 
occasion to inculcate my opinions, and persuade men into 
measures that I have been from time to time engaged in pro- 
moting; and as the chief ends of conversation are to inform or 
to be informed, to please or to persuade, I wish well-meaning, 
sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good by a 
positive, assuming manner, that seldom fails to disgust, tends 
to create opposition, and to defeat every one of those purposes 
for which speech was given to us, to wit, giving or receiving 
information or pleasure. For if you would inform, a positive 
and dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may 
provoke contradiction and prevent a candid attention. If you 
wish information and improvement from the knowledge of 
others, and yet at the same time express yourself as firmly fixed 
in your present opinions, modest, sensible men who do not love 

1 The third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) and Anthony Collins (1676-1729) 
were English Deists. 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY 15 

disputation will probably leave you undisturbed in the posses- 
sion of your error. And by such a manner you can seldom hope 
to recommend yourself in pleasing your hearers, or to persuade 
those whose concurrence you desire. Pope says, judiciously: — 

"Men should be taught as if you taught them not, 
And things unknown propos'd as things forgot " ; 

farther recommending to us 

"To speak, tho' sure, with seeming diffidence." 

And he might have coupled with this line that which he has 
coupled with another, I think less properly, 

"For want of modesty is want of sense." 

If you ask, Why less properly? I must repeat the lines, — 

"Immodest words admit of no defense, 
For want of modesty is want of sense." 

Now, is not want of sense (where a man is so unfortunate as to 
want it) some apology for his want of modesty? and would not 
the lines stand more justly thus? 

"Immodest words admit but this defense, 
That want of modesty is want of sense." 

This, however, I should submit to better judgments. 

My brother had, in 1720 or 172 1, begun to print a newspaper. 
It was the second 1 that appeared in America, and was called 
the New England Courant. The only one before it was the 
Boston News-Letter. I remember his being dissuaded by some 
of his friends from the undertaking, as not likely to succeed, 
one newspaper being, in their judgment, enough for America. 
At this time (17 71) there are not less than five-and- twenty. 
He went on, however, with the undertaking, and after having 
worked in composing the types and printing off the sheets, I 
was employed to carry the papers through the streets to the 
customers. 

He had some ingenious men among his friends, who amused 
themselves by writing little pieces for this paper, which gained 
it credit and made it more in demand, and these gentlemen 
often visited us. Hearing their conversations, and their ac- 
counts of the approbation their papers were received with, I 

1 Actually the fourth. 



16 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

was excited to try my hand among them; but being still a boy, 
and suspecting that my brother would object to printing any- 
thing of mine in his paper if he knew it to be mine, I contrived 
to disguise my hand, and writing an anonymous paper, I put 
it in at night under the door of the printing-house. It was 
found in the morning, and communicated to his writing friends 
when they called in as usual. They read it, commented on it 
in my hearing, and I had the exquisite pleasure of finding it 
met with their approbation, and that in their different guesses 
at the author, none were named but men of some character 
among us for learning and ingenuity. I suppose now that I 
was rather lucky in my judges, and that perhaps they were not 
really so very good ones as I then esteemed them. 

Encouraged, however, by this, I wrote and conveyed in the 
same way to the press several more papers which were equally 
approved; and I kept my secret till my small fund of sense for 
such performances was pretty well exhausted, and then I dis- 
covered : it, when I began to be considered a little more by my 
brother's acquaintance, and in a manner that did not quite 
please him, as he thought, probably with reason, that it tended 
to make me too vain. And, perhaps, this might be one occasion 
of the differences that we began to have about this time. 
Though a brother, he considered himself as my master, and me 
as his apprentice, and, accordingly, expected the same services 
from me as he would from another, while I thought he demeaned 
me too much in some he required of me, who from a brother 
expected more indulgence. Our disputes were often brought 
before our father, and I fancy I was either generally in the 
right, or else a better pleader, because the judgment was gen- 
erally in my favor. But my brother was passionate, and had 
often beaten me, which I took extremely amiss; and, thinking 
my apprenticeship very tedious, I was continually wishing for 
some opportunity of shortening it, which at length offered in a 
manner unexpected. 2 

One of the pieces in our newspaper on some political point, 
which I have now forgotten, gave offense to the Assembly. He 
was taken up, censured, and imprisoned for a month, by the 

1 Revealed. 

- 2 I. fancy his harsh and tyrannical treatment of me might be a means of im- 
pressing me with that aversion to arbitrary power that has stuck to me through 
my whole life. [Author's note.] 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY 17 

speaker's warrant, I suppose, because he would not discover 
his author. I too was taken up and examined before the coun- 
cil; but, though I did not give them any satisfaction, they con- 
tented themselves with admonishing me, and dismissed me, 
considering me, perhaps, as an apprentice, who was bound 
to keep his master's secrets. 

During my brother's confinement, which I resented a good 
deal, notwithstanding our private differences, I had the man- 
agement of the paper; and I made bold to give our rulers some 
rubs in it, which my brother took very kindly, while others 
began to consider me in an unfavorable light, as a young genius 
that had a turn for libelling and satire. My brother's discharge 
was accompanied with an order of the House (a very odd one), 
that "James Franklin should no longer print the paper called the 
New England Courant." 

There was a consultation held in our printing-house among 
his friends, what he should do in this case. Some proposed to 
evade the order by changing the name of the paper; but my 
brother, seeing inconveniences in that, it was finally concluded 
on as a better way, to let it be printed for the future under the 
name of Benjamin Franklin; and to avoid the censure of the 
Assembly, that might fall on him as still printing it by his 
apprentice, the contrivance was that my old indenture should 
be returned to me, with a full discharge on the back of it, to 
be shown on occasion, but to secure to him the benefit of my 
service, I was to sign new indentures for the remainder of the 
term, which were to be kept private. A very flimsy scheme it 
was; however, it was immediately executed, and the paper went 
on accordingly, under my name for several months. 

At length, a fresh difference arising between my brother and 
me, I took upon me to assert my freedom, presuming that he 
would not venture to produce the new indentures. It was not 
fair in me to take this advantage, and this I therefore reckon 
one of the first errata of my life ; but the unfairness of it weighed 
little with me, when under the impressions of resentment for 
the blows his passion too often urged him to bestow upon me, 
though he was otherwise not an ill-natured man: perhaps I was 
too saucy and provoking. 

When he found I would leave him, he took care to prevent 
my getting employment in any other printing-house of the 



18 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

town, by going round and speaking to every master, who 
accordingly refused to give me work. I then thought of going 
to New York, as the nearest place where there was a printer; 
and I was rather inclined to leave Boston when I reflected that 
I had already made myself a little obnoxious to the governing 
party, and from the arbitrary proceedings of the Assembly in 
my brother's case, it was likely I might, if I stayed, soon bring 
myself into scrapes; and further, that my indiscreet disputa- 
tions about religion began to make me pointed at with horror 
by good people as an infidel or atheist. I determined on the 
point, but my father now siding with my brother, I was sensi- 
ble that if I attempted to go openly, means would be used to 
prevent me. My friend Collins, therefore, undertook to man- 
age a little for me. He agreed with the captain of a New York 
sloop for my passage, under the notion of my being a young 
acquaintance of his that had got a naughty girl with child, 
whose friends would compel me to marry her, and therefore I 
could not appear or come away publicly. So I sold some of my 
books to raise a little money, was taken on board privately, and 
as we had a fair wind, in three days I found myself in New York, 
near three hundred miles from home, a boy of but seventeen, 
without the least recommendation to, or knowledge of, any 
person in the place, and with very little money in my pocket. 

My inclinations for the sea were by this time worn out, or I 
might now have gratified them. But, having a trade, and sup- 
posing myself a pretty good workman, I offered my service to 
the printer in the place, old Mr. William Bradford, who had 
been the first printer in Pennsylvania, but removed from thence 
upon the quarrel of George Keith. He could give me no em- 
ployment, having little to do, and help enough already; but 
says he, "My son at Philadelphia has lately lost his principal 
hand, Aquila Rose, by death; if you go thither, I believe he 
may employ you." Philadelphia was a hundred miles further; 
I set out, however, in a boat for Amboy, leaving my chest and 
things to follow me round by sea. 

In crossing the bay, we met with a squall that tore our rotten 
sails to pieces, prevented our getting into the Kill, and drove 
us upon Long Island. In our way, a drunken Dutchman, who 
was a passenger too, fell overboard; when he was sinking, I 
reached through the water to his shock pate, and drew him up, 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY 19 

so that we got him in again. His ducking sobered him a little, 
and he went to sleep, taking first out of his pocket a book, 
which he desired I would dry for him. It proved to be my old 
favorite author, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, in Dutch, finely 
printed on good paper, with copper cuts, a dress better than I 
had ever seen it wear in its own language. I have since found 
that it has been translated into most of the languages of Europe, 
and suppose it has been more generally read than any other 
book, except perhaps the Bible. Honest John was the first that 
I know of who mixed narration and dialogue; a method of 
writing very engaging to the reader, who in the most interest- 
ing parts finds himself, as it were, brought into the company 
and present at the discourse. De Foe in his Crusoe, his Moll 
Flanders, Religious Courtship, Family Instructor, and other 
pieces, has imitated it with success, and Richardson has done 
the same in his Pamela, etc. 

When we drew near the island, we found it was at a place 
where there could be no landing, there being a great surf on 
the stony beach. So we dropped anchor, and swung round 
towards the shore. Some people came down to the water edge 
and hallooed to us, as we did to them; but the wind was so high, 
and the surf so loud, that we could not hear so as to understand 
each other. There were canoes on the shore, and we made signs, 
and hallooed that they should fetch us ; but they either did not 
understand us, or thought it impracticable, so they went away, 
and night coming on, we had no remedy but to wait till the 
wind should abate; and, in the mean time, the boatman and I 
concluded to sleep, if we could ; and so crowded into the scuttle, 
with the Dutchman, who was still wet; and the spray beating 
over the head of our boat, leaked through to us, so that we 
were soon almost as wet as he. In this manner we lay all night, 
with very little rest; but the wind abating the next day, we 
made a shift to reach Amboy before night, having been thirty 
hours on the water, without victuals, or any drink but a bottle 
of filthy rum, the water we sailed on being salt. 

In the evening I found myself very feverish, and went in to 
bed; but having read somewhere that cold water drank plenti- 
fully was good for a fever, I followed the prescription, sweat 
plentifully most of the night, my fever left me, and in the 
morning, crossing the ferry, I proceeded on my journey on foot, 



20 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

having fifty miles to Burlington, where I was told I should 
find boats that would carry me the rest of the way to Phila- 
delphia. 

It rained very hard all the day; I was thoroughly soaked, and 
by noon a good deal tired ; so I stopped at a poor inn, where I 
stayed all night, beginning now to wish that I had never left 
home. I cut so miserable a figure, too, that I found, by the 
questions asked me, I was suspected to be some runaway serv- 
ant, and in danger of being taken up on that suspicion. How- 
ever, I proceeded the next day, and got in the evening to an inn, 
within eight or ten miles of Burlington, kept by one Dr. Brown. 
He entered into conversation with me while I took some re- 
freshment, and, finding I had read a little, became very sociable 
and friendly. Our acquaintance continued as long as he lived. 
He had been, I imagine, an itinerant doctor, for there was no 
town in England, or country in Europe, of which he could not 
give a very particular account. He had some letters, and was 
ingenious, but much of an unbeliever, and wickedly undertook, 
some years after, to travesty the Bible in doggerel verse, as 
Cotton had done Virgil. By this means he set many of the facts 
in a very ridiculous light, and might have hurt weak minds if 
his work had been published ; but it never was. 

At his house I lay that night, and the next morning reached 
Burlington, but had the mortification to find that the regular 
boats were gone a little before my coming, and no other ex- 
pected to go before Tuesday, this being Saturday; wherefore I 
returned to an old woman in the town, of whom I had bought 
gingerbread to eat on the water, and asked her advice. She 
invited me to lodge at her house till a passage by water should 
offer; and being tired with my foot traveling, I accepted the 
invitation. She, understanding I was a printer, would have 
had me stay at that town and follow my business, being igno- 
rant of the stock necessary to begin with. She was very hospita- 
ble, gave me a dinner of ox-cheek with great good-will, accept- 
ing only of a pot of ale in return; and I thought myself fixed 
till Tuesday should come. However, walking in the evening 
by the side of the river, a boat came by, which I found was 
going towards Philadelphia, with several people in her. They 
took me in, and, as there was no wind, we rowed all the way; 
and about midnight, not having yet seen the city, some of the 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY 21 

company were confident we must have passed it, and would 
row no farther; the others knew not where we were; so we put 
toward the shore, got into a creek, landed near an old fence, 
with the rails of which we made a fire, the night being cold, in 
October, and there we remained till daylight. Then one of the 
company knew the place to be Cooper's Creek, a little above 
Philadelphia, which we saw as soon as we got out of the creek, 
and arrived there about eight or nine o'clock on the Sunday 
morning, and landed at the Market Street wharf. 

I have been the more particular in this description of my 
journey, and shall be so of my first entry into that city, that 
you may in your mind compare such unlikely beginnings with 
the figure I have since made there. I was in my working-dress, 
my best clothes being to come round by sea. I was dirty from 
my journey; my pockets were stuffed out with shirts and stock- 
ings, and I knew no soul nor where to look for lodging. I was 
fatigued with traveling, rowing, and want of rest, I was very 
hungry; and my whole stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dol- 
lar, and about a shilling in copper. The latter I gave the people 
of the boat for my passage, who at first refused it on account 
of my rowing; but I insisted on their taking it. A man being 
sometimes more generous when he has but a little money than 
when he has plenty, perhaps through fear of being thought to 
have but little. 

Then I walked up the street, gazing about till near the 
market-house I met a boy with bread. I had made many a 
meal on bread, and inquiring where he got it, I went immedi- 
ately to the baker's he directed me to, in Second Street, and 
asked for biscuit, intending such as we had in Boston; but 
they, it seems, were not made in Philadelphia. Then I asked 
for a three-penny loaf, and was told they had none such. So 
not considering or knowing the difference of money, and the 
greater cheapness nor the names of his bread, I bade him give 
me three-penny worth of any sort. He gave me, accordingly, 
three great puffy rolls. I was surprised at the quantity, but 
took it, and having no room in my pockets, walked off with a 
roll under each arm, and eating the other. Thus I went up 
Market Street as far as Fourth Street, passing by the door of 
Mr. Read, my future wife's father; when she, standing at the 
door, saw me, and thought I made, as I certainly did, a most 



22 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

awkward, ridiculous appearance. Then I turned and went down 
Chestnut Street and part of Walnut Street, eating my roll all 
the way, and coming round, found myself again at Market 
Street wharf, near the boat I came in, to which I went for a 
draught of the river water; and being filled with one of my rolls, 
gave the other two to a woman and her child that came down 
the river in the boat with us, and were waiting to go farther. 

Thus refreshed, I walked again up the street, which by this 
time had many clean-dressed people in it, who were all walking 
the same way. I joined' them, and thereby was led into the 
great meeting-house of the Quakers near the market. I sat 
down among them, and after looking round a while and hearing 
nothing said, being very drowsy through labor and want of rest 
the preceding night, I fell fast asleep, and continued so till the 
meeting broke up, when one was kind enough to rouse me. 
This was, therefore, the first house I was in or slept in, in 
Philadelphia. 

Walking down again toward the river, and looking in the 
faces of people, I met a young Quaker man, whose countenance 
I liked, and, accosting him, requested he would tell me where 
a stranger could get lodging. We were then near the sign of the 
Three Mariners. "Here," says he, "is one place that enter- 
tains strangers, but it is not a reputable house; if thee wilt walk 
with me, I'll show thee a better." He brought me to the 
Crooked Billet in Water Street. Here I got a dinner; and while 
I was eating it, several sly questions were asked me, as it 
seemed to be suspected from my youth and appearance that I 
might be some runaway. 

After dinner, my sleepiness returned, and being shown to a 
bed, I lay down without undressing, and slept till six in the 
evening, was called to supper, went to bed again very early, 
and slept soundly till next morning. Then I made myself as 
tidy as I could, and went to Andrew Bradford the printer's. I 
found in the shop the old man his father, whom I had seen at 
New York, and who, traveling on horseback, had got to Phila- 
delphia before me. He introduced me to his son, who received 
me civilly, gave me a breakfast, but told me he did not at 
present want a hand, being lately supplied with one; but there 
was another printer in town, lately set up, one Keimer, who, 
perhaps, might employ me; if not, I should be welcome to lodge 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY 23 

at his house, and he would give me a little work to do now and 
then till fuller business should offer. 

The old gentleman said he would go with me to the new 
printer; and when we found him, "Neighbor," says Bradford, 
" I have brought to see you a young man of your business; per- 
haps you may want such a one." He asked me a few questions, 
put a composing stick in my hand to see how I worked, and 
then said he would employ me soon, though he had just then 
nothing for me to do; and taking old Bradford, whom he had 
never seen before, to be one of the town's people that had a 
good will for him, entered into a conversation on his present 
undertaking and prospects; while Bradford, not discovering 
that he was the other printer's father, on Keimer's saying he 
expected soon to get the greatest part of the business into his 
own hands, drew him on by artful questions, and starting little 
doubts, to explain all his views, what interests he relied on, and 
in what manner he intended to proceed. I, who stood by and 
heard all, saw immediately that one of them was a crafty old 
sophister, and the other a mere novice. Bradford left me with 
Keimer, who was greatly surprised when I told him who the 
old man was. 

Keimer's printing-house, I found, consisted of an old shat- 
tered press, and one small, worn-out font of English, which he 
was then using himself, composing an Elegy on Aquila Rose, 
before mentioned, an ingenious young man, of excellent char- 
acter, much respected in the town, clerk of the Assembly, and 
a pretty poet. Keimer made verses too, but very indifferently. 
He could not be said to write them, for his manner was to com- 
pose them in the types directly out of his head. So there being 
no copy, but one pair of cases, and the Elegy likely to require 
all the letter, 1 no one could help him. I endeavored to put his 
press (which he had not yet used, and of which he understood 
nothing) into order fit to be worked with; and promising to 
come and print off his Elegy as soon as he should have got it 
ready, I returned to Bradford's, who gave me a little job to do 
for the present, and there I lodged and dieted. A few days 
after, Keimer sent for me to print off the Elegy. And now he 
had got another pair of cases, and a pamphlet to reprint, on 
which he set me to work. 

1 The types. 



24 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

These two printers I found poorly qualified for their business. 
Bradford had not been bred to it, and was very illiterate; and 
Keimer, though something of a scholar, was a mere compositor 
knowing nothing of presswork. He had been one of the French 
prophets, 1 and could act their enthusiastic agitations. At this 
time he did not profess any particular religion, but something 
of all on occasion; was very ignorant of the world, and had, as I 
afterward found, a good deal of the knave in his composition. 
He did not like my lodging at Bradford's while I worked with 
him. He had a house indeed, but without furniture, so he could 
not lodge me; but he got me a lodging at Mr. Read's before 
mentioned, who was the owner of his house; and my chest and 
clothes being come by this time, I made rather a more respect- 
able appearance in the eyes of Miss Read than I had done when 
she first happened to see me eating my roll in the street. 

I began now to have some acquaintance among the young 
people of the town that were lovers of reading, with whom I 
spent my evenings very pleasantly; and gaining money by my 
industry and frugality, I lived very agreeably, forgetting Boston 
as much as I could, and not desiring that any there should 
know where I resided except my friend Collins, who was in my 
secret, and kept it when I wrote to him. At length, an incident 
happened that sent me back again much sooner than I had 
intended. I had a brother-in-law, Robert Holmes, master of 
a sloop that traded between Boston and Delaware. He being 
at Newcastle, forty miles below Philadelphia, heard there of 
me, and wrote me a letter mentioning the concern of my 
friends in Boston at my abrupt departure, assuring me of their 
good-will to me, and that everything would be accommodated 
to my mind if I would return, to which he exhorted me very 
earnestly. I wrote an answer to his letter, thanked him for his 
advice, but stated my reasons for quitting Boston fully and in 
such a light as to convince him I was not so wrong as he had 
apprehended. 

Sir William Keith, governor of the province, was then at 
Newcastle, and Captain Holmes, happening to be in company 
with him when my letter came to hand, spoke to him of me, 
and showed him the letter. The governor read it, and seemed 
surprised when he was told my age. He said I appeared a young 

1 A religious sect. 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



25 



man of promising parts, and therefore should be encouraged; 
the printers at Philadelphia were wretched ones; and, if I would 
set up there, he made no doubt I should succeed ; for his part, 
he would procure me the public business, and do me every 
other service in his power. This my brother-in-law afterwards 
told me in Boston, but I knew as yet nothing of it; when, one 
day, Keimer and I being at work together near the window, 
we saw the governor and another gentleman (which proved to 
be Colonel French of Newcastle), finely dressed, come directly 
across the street to our house, and heard them at the door. 

Keimer ran down immediately, thinking it a visit to him; 
but the governor inquired for me, came up, and with a conde- 
scension and politeness I had been quite unused to made me 
many compliments, desired to be acquainted with me, blamed 
me kindly for not having made myself known to him when I 
first came to the place, and would have me away with him to 
the tavern, where he was going with Colonel French to taste, 
as he said, some excellent Madeira. I was not a little surprised, 
and Keimer stared like a pig poisoned. I went, however, with 
the governor and Colonel French to a tavern, at the corner of 
Third Street, and over the Madeira he proposed my setting up 
my business, laid before me the probabilities of success, and 
both he and Colonel French assured me I should have their 
interest and influence in procuring the public business of both 
governments. On my doubting whether my father would assist 
me in it, Sir William said he would give me a letter to him, in 
which he would state the advantages, and he did not doubt of 
prevailing with him. So it was concluded I should return to 
Boston in the first vessel, with the governor's letter recom- 
mending me to my father. In the mean time the intention was 
to be kept a secret, and I went on working with Keimer as 
usual, the governor sending for me now and then to dine with 
him, a very great honor I thought it, and conversing with me 
in the most affable, familiar, and friendly manner imaginable. 

About the end of April, 1724, a little vessel offered for Boston. 
I took leave of Keimer as going to see my friends. The governor 
gave me an ample letter, saying many flattering things of me 
to my father, and strongly recommending the project of my 
setting up at Philadelphia as a thing that must make my for- 
tune. We struck on a shoal in going down the bay, and sprung 



26 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

a leak; we had a blustering time at sea, and were obliged to 
pump almost continually, at which I took my turn. We arrived 
safe, however, at Boston in about a fortnight. I had been ab- 
sent seven months, and my friends had heard nothing of me; 
for my brother Holmes was not yet returned, and had not 
written about me. My unexpected appearance surprised the 
family; all were, however, very glad to see me, and made me 
welcome, except my brother. I went to see him at his print- 
ing-house. I was better dressed than ever while in his service, 
having a genteel new suit from head to foot, a watch, and my 
pockets lined with near five pounds sterling in silver. He re- 
ceived me not very frankly, looked me all over, and turned to . 
his work again. 

The journeymen were inquisitive where I had been, what 
sort of a country it was, and how I liked it. I praised it much, 
and the happy life I led in it; expressing strongly my intention 
of returning to it; and one of them asking what kind of money 
we had there, I produced a handful of silver, and spread it 
before them, which was a kind of rare show they had not been 
used to, paper being the money of Boston. Then I took an 
opportunity of letting them see my watch; and, lastly (my 
brother still grum and sullen), I gave them a piece of eight 1 to 
drink, and took my leave. This visit of mine offended him 
extremely; for, when my mother some time after spoke to him 
of a reconciliation, and of her wishes to see us on good terms 
together, and that we might live for the future as brothers, he 
said I had insulted him in such a manner before his people that 
he could never forget or forgive it. In this, however, he was 
mistaken. 

My father received the governor's letter with some apparent 
surprise, but said little of it to me for some days, when Captain 
Holmes returning he showed it to him, asked him if he knew 
Keith, and what kind of man he was; adding his opinion that 
he must be of small discretion to think of setting a boy up in 
business who wanted yet three years of being at man's estate. 
Holmes said what he could in favor of the project, but my father 
was clear in the impropriety of it, and at last gave a flat denial 
to it. Then he wrote a civil letter to Sir William, thanking him 
for the patronage he had so kindly offered me, but declining 
1 Spanish dollar. 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY 27 

to assist me as yet in setting up, I being, in his opinion, too 
young to be trusted with the management of a business so 
important, and for which the preparation must be so expensive. 

My friend and companion Collins, who was a clerk in the 
post-office, pleased with the account I gave him of my new 
country, determined to go thither also; and, while I waited for 
my father's determination, he set out before me by land to 
Rhode Island, leaving his books, which were a pretty collection 
of mathematics and natural philosophy, to come with mine and 
me to New York, where he proposed to wait for me. 

My father, though he did not approve Sir William's proposi- 
tion, was yet pleased that I had been able to obtain so advan- 
tageous a character from a person of such note where I had 
resided, and that I had been so industrious and careful as to 
equip myself so handsomely in so short a time; therefore, seeing 
no prospect of an accommodation between my brother and me, 
he gave his consent to my returning again to Philadelphia, 
advised me to behave respectfully to the people there, endeavor 
to obtain the general esteem, and avoid lampooning and libel- 
ling, to which he thought I had too much inclination; telling 
me, that by steady industry and a prudent parsimony I might 
save enough by the time I was one-and-twenty to set me up; 
and that, if I came near the matter, he would help me out with 
the rest. This was all I could obtain, except some small gifts 
as tokens of his and my mother's love, when I embarked again 
for New York, now with their approbation and their blessing. 

The sloop putting in at Newport, Rhode Island, I visited my 
brother John, who had been married and settled there some 
years. He received me very affectionately, for he always loved 
me. A friend of his, one Vernon, having some money due to 
him in Pennsylvania, about thirty-five pounds currency, de- 
sired I would receive it for him, and keep it till I had his direc- 
tions what to remit it in. Accordingly, he gave me an order. 
This afterwards occasioned me a good deal of uneasiness. 

At Newport we took in a number of passengers for New York, 
among which were two young women, companions, and a 
grave, sensible, matron-like Quaker woman, with her attend- 
ants. I had shown an obliging readiness to do her some little 
services, which impressed her I suppose with a degree of good 
will toward me; therefore, when she saw a daily growing famil- 



28 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

iarity between me and the two young women, which they ap- 
peared to encourage, she took me aside, and said, "Young man, 
I am concerned for thee, as thou has no friend with thee, and 
seems not to know much of the world, or of the snares youth is 
exposed to; depend upon it, those are very bad women; I can 
see it in all their actions; and if thee art not upon thy guard, 
they will draw thee into some danger; they are strangers to 
thee, and I advise thee, in a friendly concern for thy welfare, 
to have no acquaintance with them." As I seemed at first not 
to think so ill of them as she did, she mentioned some things 
she had observed and heard that had escaped my notice, but 
now convinced me she was right. I thanked.her for her kind 
advice, and promised to follow it. When we arrived at New 
York, they told me where they lived, and invited me to come 
and see them; but I avoided it, and it was well I did; for the 
next day the captain missed a silver spoon and some other 
things, that had been taken out of his cabin, and, knowing that 
these were a couple of strumpets, he got a warrant to search 
their lodgings, found the stolen goods, and had the thieves 
punished. So, though we had escaped a sunken rock, which we 
scraped upon in the passage, I thought this escape of rather 
more importance to me. 

At New York I found my friend Collins, who had arrived 
there some time before me. We had been intimate from chil- 
dren, and had read the same books together; but he had the 
advantage of more time for reading and studying, and a won- 
derful genius for mathematical learning, in which he far out- 
stripped me. While I lived in Boston, most of my hours of 
leisure for conversation were spent with him, and he continued 
a sober as well as an industrious lad; was much respected for 
his learning by several of the clergy and other gentlemen, and 
seemed to promise making a good figure in life. But, during my 
absence, he had acquired a habit of sotting with brandy; and I 
found by his own account, and what I heard from others, that 
he had been drunk every day since his arrival at New York, 
and behaved very oddly. He had gamed, too, and lost his 
money, so that I was obliged to discharge his lodgings, and 
defray his expenses to and at Philadelphia, which proved 
extremely inconvenient to me. 

The then governor of New York, Burnet (son of Bishop 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY 29 

Burnet), hearing from the captain that a young man, one of his 
passengers, had a great many books, desired he would bring 
me to see him. I waited upon him accordingly, and should 
have taken Collins with me but that he was not sober. The 
governor treated me with great civility, showed me his library, 
which was a very large one, and we had a good deal of conversa- 
tion about books and authors. This was the second governor 
who had done me the honor to take notice of me ; which, to a 
poor boy like me, was very pleasing. 

We proceeded to Philadelphia. I received on the way Ver- 
non's money, without which we could hardly have finished our 
journey. Collins wished to be employed in some counting- 
house; but, whether they discovered his dramming by his 
breath, or by his behavior, though he had some recommenda- 
tions, he met with no success in any application, and continued 
lodging and boarding at the same house with me, and at my 
expense. Knowing I had that money of Vernon's he was con- 
tinually borrowing of me, still promising repayment as soon as 
he should be in business. At length he had got so much of it 
that I was distressed to think what I should do in case of being 
called on to remit it. 

His drinking continued, about which we sometimes quar- 
relled; for, when a little intoxicated, he was very fractious. 
Once, in a boat on the Delaware with some other young men, 
he refused to row in his turn. "I will be rowed home," says he. 
"We will not row you," says I. "You must, or stay all night on 
the water," says he, "just as you please." The others said, 
"Let us row; what signifies it?" But, my mind being soured 
with his other conduct, I continued to refuse. So he swore he 
would make me row, or throw me overboard; and coming along, 
stepping on the thwarts, toward me, when he came up and 
struck at me, I clapped my hand under his crotch, and, rising, 
pitched him head-foremost into the river. I knew he was a 
good swimmer, and so was under little concern about him; but 
before he could get round to lay hold of the boat, we had with 
a few strokes pulled her out of his reach; and ever when he 
drew near the boat, we asked if he would row, striking a few 
strokes to slide her away from him. He was ready to die with 
vexation, and obstinately would not promise to row. However, 
seeing him at last beginning to tire we lifted him in and brought 



30 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

him home dripping wet in the evening. We hardly exchanged a 
civil word afterwards, and a West India captain, who had a 
commission to procure a tutor for the sons of a gentleman at 
Barbadoes, happening to meet with him, agreed to carry him 
thither. He left me then, promising to remit me the first 
money he should receive in order to discharge the debt; but I 
never heard of him after. 

The breaking into this money of Vernon's was one of the 
first great errata of my life; and this affair showed that my 
father was not much out in his judgment when he supposed 
me too young to manage business of importance. But Sir 
William, on reading his letter, said he was too prudent. There 
was great difference in persons; and discretion did not always 
accompany years, nor was youth always without it. "And 
since he will not set you up," says he, " I will do it myself. Give 
me an inventory of the things necessary to be had from Eng- 
land, and I will send for them. You shall repay me when you 
are able; I am resolved to have a good printer here, and I am 
sure you must succeed. " This was spoken with such an appear- 
ance of cordiality that I had not the least doubt of his meaning 
what he said. I had hitherto kept the proposition of my setting 
up a secret in Philadelphia, and I still kept it. Had it been 
known that I depended on the governor, probably some friend, 
that knew him better, would have advised me not to rely on 
him, as I afterwards heard it as his known character to be lib- 
eral of promises which he never meant to keep. Yet, unsolicited 
as he was by me, how could I think his generous offers insincere? 
I believed him one of the best men in the world. 

I presented him an inventory of a little printing-house, 
amounting by my computation to about one hundred pounds 
sterling. He liked it, but asked me if my being on the spot in 
England to choose the types, and see that everything was good 
of the kind, might not be of some advantage. " Then," says he, 
"when there, you may make acquaintances, and establish 
correspondences in the book-selling and stationery way." I 
agreed that this might be advantageous. "Then," says he, 
"get yourself ready to go with Annis," which was the annual 
ship, and the only one at that time usually passing between 
London and Philadelphia. But it would be some months before 
Annis sailed, so I continued working with Keimer, fretting 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY 31 

about the money Collins had got from me, and in daily appre- 
hensions of being called upon by Vernon, which, however, did 
not happen for some years after. 

I believe I have omitted mentioning that, in my first voyage 
from Boston, being becalmed off Block Island, our people set 
about catching cod, and hauled up a great many. Hitherto I 
had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on 
this occasion I considered, with my master Tryon, the taking 
every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them 
had, or ever could do us any injury that might justify the 
slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly 
been a great lover of fish, and, when this came hot out of the 
frying-pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanced some time 
between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when 
the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their 
stomachs; then thought I, "If you eat one another, I don't see 
why we may n't eat you." So I dined upon cod very heartily, 
and continued to eat with other people, returning only now 
and then occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient a 
thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to 
find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do. 

Keimer and I lived on a pretty good familiar footing, and 
agreed tolerably well, for he suspected nothing of my setting 
up. He retained a great deal of his old enthusiasm and loved 
argumentation. We therefore had many disputations. I used 
to work him so with my Socratic method, and trepanned him so 
often by questions apparently so distant from any point we 
had in hand, and yet by degrees led to the point, and brought 
him into difficulties and contradictions, that at last he grew 
ridiculously cautious, and would hardly answer me the most 
common question, without asking first, " What do you intend to 
infer from that?" However, it gave him so high an opinion of 
my abilities in the confuting way, that he seriously proposed 
my being his colleague in a project he had of setting up a new 
sect. He was to preach the doctrines, and I was to confound 
all opponents. When he came to explain with me upon the 
doctrines, I found several conundrums which I objected to, 
unless I might have my way a little too, and introduce some of 
mine. 

Keimer wore his beard at full length, because somewhere in 



32 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

the Mosaic law it is said, " Thou shalt not mar the corners of thy 
beard." He likewise kept the Seventh day, Sabbath; and these 
two points were essentials with him. I disliked both; but 
agreed to admit them upon condition of his adopting the doc- 
trine of using no animal food. "I doubt," said he, "my consti- 
tution will not bear that." I assured him it would, and that he 
would be the better for it. He was usually a great glutton, and 
I promised myself some diversion in half starving him. He 
agreed to try the practice, if I would keep him company. I did 
so, and we held it for three months. We had our victuals 
dressed, and brought to us regularly by a woman in the neigh- 
borhood, who had from me a list of forty dishes, to be prepared 
for us at different times, in all of which there was neither fish, 
flesh, nor fowl, and the whim suited me the better at this time 
from the cheapness of it, not costing us above eighteen pence 
sterling each per week. I have since kept several Lents most 
strictly, leaving the common diet for that and that for the 
common, abruptly without the least inconvenience, so that I 
think that there is little in the advice of making those changes 
by easy gradations. I went on pleasantly, but poor Keimer 
suffered grievously, tired of the project, longed for the flesh- 
pots of Egypt, 1 and ordered a roast pig. He invited me and two 
women friends to dine with him; but, it being too soon upon 
the table, he could not resist the temptation, and ate the whole 
before we came. 

I had made some courtship during this time to Miss Read. 
I had a great respect and affection for her, and had some reason 
to believe she had the same for me ; but as I was about to take 
a long voyage, and we were both very young, only a little above 
eighteen, it was thought most prudent by her mother to pre- 
vent our going too far at present, as a marriage, if it was to 
take place, would be more convenient after my return, when I 
should be, as I expected, set up in my business. Perhaps, too, 
she thought my expectations not so well founded as I imagined 
them to be. 

My chief acquaintances at this time were Charles Osborne, 
Joseph Watson, and James Ralph, all lovers of reading. The 
two first were clerks to an eminent scrivener or conveyancer 
in the town, Charles Brogden; the other was clerk to a mer- 

1 Exodus xvi, 3. 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY 33 

chant. Watson was a pious, sensible young man, of great integ- 
rity; the others rather more lax in their principles of religion, 
particularly Ralph, who as well as Collins, had been unsettled 
by me, for which they both made me suffer. Osborne was sen- 
sible, candid, frank; sincere and affectionate to his friends; but 
in literary matters, too fond of criticising. Ralph was ingenious, 
genteel in his manners, and extremely eloquent; I think I never 
knew a prettier talker. Both of them great admirers of poetry, 
and began to try their hands in little pieces. Many pleasant 
walks we four had together on Sundays into the woods, near 
Schuylkill, where we read to one another, and conferred on 
what we read. 

Ralph was inclined to pursue the study of poetry, not doubt- 
ing but he might become eminent in it and make his fortune by 
it, alleging that the best poets must, when they first began to 
write, make as many faults as he did. Osborne dissuaded him, 
assured him he had no genius for poetry, and advised him to 
think of nothing beyond the business he was bred to; that in 
the mercantile way, though he had no stock, he might by his 
diligence and punctuality recommend himself to employment 
as a factor, and in time acquire wherewith to trade on his own 
account. I approved the amusing one's self with poetry now 
and then, so far as to improve one's language, but no farther. 

On this it was proposed that we should each of us, at our 
next meeting, produce a piece of our own composing, in order 
to improve by our mutual observations, criticisms, and correc- 
tions. As language and expression were what we had in view, 
we excluded all considerations of invention by agreeing that 
the task should be a version of the eighteenth Psalm, which 
describes the descent of a Deity. When the time of our meeting 
drew nigh, Ralph called on me first, and let me know his piece 
was ready. I told him I had been busy, and having little incli- 
nation, had done nothing. He then showed me his piece for 
my opinion, and I much approved it, as it appeared to me to 
have great merit. "Now," says he, "Osborne never will allow 
the least merit in anything of mine, but makes a thousand criti- 
cisms out of mere envy. He is not so jealous of you; I wish, 
therefore, you would take this piece, and produce it as yours; 
I will pretend not to have had time, and so produce nothing. 
We shall then see what he will say to it." It was agreed, and I 



34 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

immediately transcribed it, that it might appear in my own 
hand. 

We met; Watson's performance was read; there were some 
beauties in it, but many defects. Osborne's was read; it was 
much better; Ralph did it justice; remarked some faults, but 
applauded the beauties. He himself had nothing to produce. 
I was backward ; seemed desirous of being excused ; had not had 
sufficient time to correct, etc. ; but no excuse could be admitted ; 
produce I must. It was read and repeated ; Watson and Osborne 
gave up the contest, and joined in applauding it. Ralph only 
made some criticisms, and proposed some amendments; but I 
defended my text. Osborne was against Ralph, and told him 
he was no better a critic than poet, so he dropped the argument. 
As they two went home together, Osborne expressed himself 
still more strongly in favor of what he thought my production; 
having restrained himself before, as he said, lest I should think 
it flattery. "But who would have imagined," said he, "that 
Franklin had been capable of such a performance ; such paint- 
ing, such force, such fire! He has even improved the original. 
In his common conversation he seems to have no choice of 
words; he hesitates and blunders; and yet, good God! how he 
writes!" When we next met, Ralph discovered the trick we 
had played him, and Osborne was a little laughed at. 

This transaction fixed Ralph in his resolution of becoming a 
poet. I did all I could to dissuade him from it, but he continued 
scribbling verses till Pope cured him. 1 He became, however, a 
pretty good prose writer. More of him hereafter. But, as I 
may not have occasion again to mention the other two, I shall 
just remark here, that Watson died in my arms a few years 
after, much lamented, being the best of our set. Osborne went 
to the West Indies, where he became an eminent lawyer and 
made money, but died young. He and I had made a serious 
agreement, that the one who happened first to die should, if 
possible, make a friendly visit to the other, and acquaint him 
how he found things in that separate state. But he never ful- 
filled his promise. 

The governor, seeming to like my company, had me fre- 

1 "Silence, ye wolves! while Ralph to Cynthia howls, 
And makes Night hideous — answer him, ye owls." 

(Pope, Dunciad.) 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY 35 

quently to his house, and his setting me up was always men- 
tioned as a fixed thing. I was to take with me letters recom- 
mendatory to a number of his friends, besides the letter of 
credit to furnish me with the necessary money for purchasing 
the press and types, paper, etc. For these letters I was ap- 
pointed to call at different times, when they were to be ready; 
but a future time was still named. Thus he went on till the 
ship, whose departure too had been several times postponed, 
was on the point of sailing. Then, when I called to take my 
leave and receive the letters, his secretary, Dr. Bard, came out 
to me and said the governor was extremely busy in writing, but 
would be down at Newcastle before the ship, and there the let- 
ters would be delivered to me. 

Ralph, though married, and having one child, had deter- 
mined to accompany me in this voyage. It was thought he 
intended to establish a correspondence, and obtain goods to 
sell on commission; but I found afterwards, that, through some 
discontent with his wife's relations, he purposed to leave her on 
their hands, and never return again. Having taken leave of 
my friends, and interchanged some promises with Miss Read, 
I left Philadelphia in the ship, which anchored at Newcastle. 
The governor was there; but when I went to his lodging, the 
secretary came to me from him with the civilest message in the 
world, that he could not then see me, being engaged in business 
of the utmost importance, but should send the letters to me 
on board, wished me heartily a good voyage and a speedy 
return, etc. I returned on board a little puzzled, but still not 
doubting. 

Mr. Andrew Hamilton, a famous lawyer of Philadelphia, had 
taken passage in the same ship for himself and son. and with 
Mr. Denham, a Quaker merchant, and Messrs. Onion and 
Russel, masters of an iron work in Maryland, had engaged the 
great cabin ; so that Ralph and I were forced to take up with a 
berth in the steerage, and none on board knowing us, were con- 
sidered as ordinary persons. But Mr. Hamilton and his son 
(it was James, since governor) returned from Newcastle to 
Philadelphia, the father being recalled by a great fee to plead 
for a seized ship; and, just before we sailed, Colonel French 
coming on board, and showing me great respect, I was more 
taken notice of, and, with my friend Ralph, invited by the 



36 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

1 other gentlemen to come into the cabin, there being now room. 
Accordingly, we removed thither. 

Understanding that Colonel French had brought on board 
the governor's dispatches, I asked the captain for those letters 
that were to be under my care. He said all were put into the 
bag together and he could not then come at them; but, before 
we landed in England, I should have an opportunity of picking 
them out, so I was satisfied for the present, and we proceeded 
on our voyage. We had a sociable company in the cabin, and 
lived uncommonly well, having the addition of all Mr. Hamil- 
ton's stores, who had laid in plentifully. In this passage Mr. 
Denham contracted a friendship for me that continued during 
his life. The voyage was otherwise not a pleasant one, as we 
had a great deal of bad weather. 

When we came into the Channel, the captain kept his word 
with me, and gave me an opportunity of examining the bag for 
the governor's letters. I found none upon which my name was 
put as under my care. I picked out six or seven, that, by the 
handwriting, I thought might be the promised letters, espe- 
cially as one of them was directed to Basket, the king's printer, 
and another to some stationer. We arrived in London the 24th 
of December, 1724. I waited upon the stationer, who came first 
in my way, delivering the letter as from Governor Keith. "I 
don't know such a person," says he; but, opening the letter, 
"Oh! this is from Riddlesden. I have lately found him to be a 
complete rascal, and I will have nothing to do with him, nor 
receive any letters from him." So, putting the letter into my 
hand, he turned on his heel and left me to serve some customer. 
I was surprised to find these were not the governor's letters; 
and, after recollecting and comparing circumstances, I began 
to doubt his sincerity. I found my friend Denham, and opened 
the whole affair to him. He let me into Keith's character; told 
me there was not the least probability that he had written any 
letters for me; that no one, who knew him, had the smallest 
dependence on him ; and he laughed at the notion of the gover- 
nor's giving me a letter of credit, having, as he said, no credit 
to give. On my expressing some concern about what I should 
do, he advised me to endeavor getting some employment in the 
way of my business. "Among the printers here," said he, "you 
will improve yourself, and when you return to America, you 
will set up to greater advantage." 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY 37 

We both of us happened to know, as well as the stationer, 
that Riddlesden, the attorney, was a very knave. He had half 
ruined Miss Read's father, by persuading him to be bound for 
him. 1 By this letter it appeared there was a secret scheme on 
foot to the prejudice of Hamilton (supposed to be then coming 
over with us) ; and that Keith was concerned in it with Riddles- 
den. Denham, who was a friend of Hamilton's, thought he 
ought to be acquainted with it; so, when he arrived in England, 
which was soon after, partly from resentment and ill-will to 
Keith and Riddlesden, and partly from good-will to him, I 
waited on him, and gave him the letter. He thanked me cor- 
dially, the information being of importance to him ; and from 
that time he became my friend, greatly to my advantage after- 
wards on many occasions. 

But what shall we think of a governor's playing such pitiful 
tricks, and imposing so grossly on a poor ignorant boy ! It was 
a habit he had acquired. He wished to please everybody; and, 
having little to give, he gave expectations. He was otherwise 
an ingenious, sensible man, a pretty good writer, and a good 
governor for the people, though not for his constituents, the 
proprietaries, whose instructions he sometimes disregarded. 
Several of our best laws were of his planning and passed during 
his administration. 

1 That is, to give security for the payment of a note. 



WASHINGTON IRVING 
PETER THE HEADSTRONG 1 

IN WHICH THE TROUBLES OF NEW AMSTERDAM APPEAR TO 
THICKEN — SHOWING THE BRAVERY, IN TIME OP PERIL, 
OP A PEOPLE WHO DEFEND THEMSELVES BY RESOLUTION 

Like as an assemblage of belligerent cats, gibbering and 
caterwauling, eying one another with hideous grimaces and 
contortions, spitting in each other's faces, and on the point of 
a general clapper-clawing, are suddenly put to scampering 
rout and confusion by the appearance of a house-dog, so was 
the no less vociferous council of New Amsterdam amazed, 

1 Knickerbocker's History of New York, book vn, chapters ix-xi. Originally 
conceived as a burlesque of the ponderous Picture of New York by Dr. Samuel 
Latham Mitchill, the book was written soon after Salmagundi and published in 
December, 1809, with the following title: A History of New York, from the 
Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty; Containing among many 
Surprising and Curious Matters, the Unutterable Ponderings of Walter the Doubter, 
The Disastrous Projects of William the Testy, and the Chivalric Achievements of 
Peter the Headstrong; the Three Dutch Governors of New Amsterdam: Being the 
Only Authentic History of the Times that ever hath been or ever will be Published: 
By Dietrich Knickerbocker. This "Dietrich Knickerbocker" was, ostensibly, a 
New Yorker, "a small, elderly gentleman, not entirely in his right mind," whose 
mysterious disappearance was noticed by the New York Evening Post (really by 
Irving), in the month preceding publication of the History. The hoax at first 
succeeded — the book was accepted as veracious history; then followed uproari- 
ous delight mingled with wrath, the descendants of the Dutch feeling themselves 
outraged. The mild Irving, however, had a most innocent purpose in writing 
the book: "It was," he says, "to embody the traditions of our city in an amus- 
ing form; to illustrate its local humors, customs, and peculiarities; to clothe home 
scenes and places and familiar names with those imaginative and whimsical 
associations so seldom met with in our new country, but which live like spells 
and charms about the cities of the old world, binding the heart of the native 
inhabitant to his home." It also contains, however, incidental satire of con- 
temporary political Kfe in America. 

The chapters here printed form part of the extended account of the reign of 
Peter Stuyvesant, governor of New Netherlands from 1647 to 1664, "a tough, 
sturdy, valiant, weather-beaten, mettlesome, obstinate, leathern-sided, lion- 
hearted, generous-spirited old governor" with a wooden leg "of which he was so 
proud, that he was often heard to declare he valued it more than all his other 
limbs put together." The theme of book vn is "The Third Part of the Reign of . 
Peter the Headstrong — His Troubles with the British Nation, and the Decline 
and Fall of the Dutch Dynasty." 



PETER THE HEADSTRONG 39 

astounded, and totally dispersed, by the sudden arrival of the 
enemy. Every member waddled home as fast as his short legs 
could carry him, wheezing as he went with corpulency and 
terror. Arrived at his castle, he barricadoed the street-door, 
and buried himself in the cider-cellar, without venturing to 
peep out, lest he should have his head carried off by a cannon- 
ball. 

The sovereign people crowded into the market-place, herd- 
ing together with the instinct of sheep, who seek safety in each 
other's company when the shepherd and his dog are absent, and 
the wolf is prowling round the fold. Far from finding relief, 
however, they only increased each other's terrors. Each man 
looked ruefully in his neighbor's face, in search of encourage- 
ment, but only found in its woe-begone lineaments a confirma- 
tion of his own dismay. Not a word now was to be heard of 
conquering Great Britain, not a whisper about the sovereign 
virtues of economy, — while the old women heightened the 
general gloom by clamorously bewailing their fate, and calling 
for protection on St. Nicholas and Peter Stuyvesant. 

Oh, how did they bewail the absence of the lion-hearted 
Peter! and how did they long for the comforting presence of 
Antony Van Corlear! Indeed, a gloomy uncertainty hung over 
the fate of these adventurous heroes. Day after day had elapsed 
since the alarming message from the governor, without bring- 
ing any further tidings of his safety. Many a fearful conjecture 
was hazarded as to what had befallen him and his loyal squire. 
Had they not been devoured alive by the cannibals of Marble- 
head and Cape Cod? — had they not been put to the question 
by the great council of Amphictyons? — had they not been 
smothered in onions by the terrible men of Pyquag? In the 
midst of this consternation and perplexity, when horror, like a 
mighty nightmare, sat brooding upon the little, fat, plethoric 
city of New Amsterdam, the ears of the multitude were sud- 
denly startled by the distant sound of a trumpet: it approached, 
it grew louder and louder, and now it resounded at the city 
gate. The public could not be mistaken in the well-known 
sound; a shout of joy burst from their lips, as the gallant Peter, 
covered with dust, and followed by his faithful trumpeter, came 
galloping into the market-place. 

The first transports of the populace having subsided, they 



40 WASHINGTON IRVING 

gathered round the honest Antony, as he dismounted, over- 
whelming him with greetings and congratulations. In breath- 
less accents he related to them the marvellous adventures 
through which the old governor and himself had gone, in mak- 
ing their escape from the clutches of the terrible Amphictyons. 
But though the Stuyvesant manuscript, with its customary 
minuteness where anything touching the great Peter is con- 
cerned, is very particular as to the incidents of this masterly 
retreat, the state of the public affairs will not allow me to in- 
dulge in a full recital thereof. Let it suffice to say, that, while 
Peter Stuyvesant was anxiously revolving in his mind how he 
could make good his escape with honor and dignity, certain of 
the ships sent out for the conquest of the Manhattoes touched 
at the eastern ports to obtain supplies, and to call on the grand 
council of the league for its promised cooperation. Upon hear- 
ing of this, the vigilant Peter, perceiving that a moment's delay 
were fatal, made a secret and precipitate decampment; though 
much did it grieve his lofty soul to be obliged to turn his back 
even upon a nation of foes. Many hair-breadth 'scapes and 
divers perilous mishaps did they sustain, as they scoured, with- 
out sound of trumpet, through the fair regions of the east. 
Already was the country in an uproar with hostile preparations, 
and they were obliged to take a large circuit in their flight, lurk- 
ing along through the woody mountains of the Devil's back- 
bone ; whence the valiant Peter sallied forth one day like a lion, 
and put to rout a whole legion of squatters, consisting of three 
generations of a prolific family, who were already on their way 
to take possession of some corner of the New Netherlands. 
Nay, the faithful Antony had great difficulty, at sundry times, 
to prevent him, in the excess of his wrath, from descending 
down from the mountains, and falling, sword in hand, upon 
certain of the border-towns, who were marshalling forth their 
draggle-tailed militia. 

The first movement of the governor, on reaching his dwell- 
ing, was to mount the roof, whence he contemplated with rueful 
aspect the hostile squadron. This had already come to anchor 
in the bay, and consisted of two stout frigates, having on board, 
as John Josselyn, Gent., 1 informs us, "three hundred valiant 

1 An Englishman of the seventeenth century, who, after visiting America, 
recorded his impressions in two books. 



PETER THE HEADSTRONG 41 

red-coats." Having taken this survey, he sat himself down and 
wrote an epistle to the commander, demanding the reason of 
his anchoring in the harbor without obtaining previous per- 
mission so to do. This letter was couched in the most dignified 
and courteous terms, though I have it from undoubted author- 
ity that his teeth were clinched, and he had a bitter, sardonic 
grin upon his visage all the while he wrote. Having dispatched 
his letter, the grim Peter stumped to and fro about the town 
with a most war-betokening countenance, his hands thrust 
into his breeches-pockets, and whistling a Low-Dutch psalm- 
tune, which bore no small resemblance to the music of a north- 
east wind, when a storm is brewing. The very dogs as they eyed 
him skulked away in dismay; while all the old and ugly women 
of New Amsterdam ran howling at his heels, imploring him to 
save them from murder, robbery, and pitiless ravishment! 

The reply of Colonel Nicholas, who commanded the invaders, 
was couched in terms of equal courtesy with the letter of the 
governor; declaring the right and title of his British Majesty 
to the province; where he affirmed the Dutch to be mere inter- 
lopers; and demanding that the town, forts, etc., should be 
forthwith rendered into his Majesty's obedience and protection; 
promising, at the same time, life, liberty, estate, and free trade 
to every Dutch denizen who should readily submit to his 
Majesty's government. 

Peter Stuyvesant read over this friendly epistle with some 
such harmony of aspect as we may suppose a crusty farmer 
reads the loving letter of John Stiles, 1 warning him of an action 
of ejectment. He was not, however, to be taken by surprise; 
but, thrusting the summons into his breeches-pocket, stalked 
three times across the room, took a pinch of snuff with great 
vehemence, and then, loftily waving his hand, promised to 
send an answer the next morning. He now summoned a general 
meeting of his privy councillors and burgomasters, not to ask 
their advice, for, confident in his own strong head, he needed 
no man's counsel, but apparently to give them a piece of his 
mind on their late craven conduct. 

His orders being duly promulgated, it was a piteous sight to 
behold the late valiant burgomasters, who had demolished the 
whole British empire in their harangues, peeping ruefully out 
1 A fictitious name, similar in function to John Doe. 



42 WASHINGTON IRVING 

of their hiding-places; crawling cautiously forth; dodging 
through narrow lanes and alleys; starting at every little dog 
that barked; mistaking lamp-posts for British grenadiers; and, 
in the excess of their panic, metamorphosing pumps into for- 
midable soldiers levelling blunderbusses at their bosoms ! Hav- 
ing, however, in despite of numerous perils and difficulties of 
the kind, arrived safe, without the loss of a single man, at the 
hall of assembly, they took their seats, and awaited in fearful 
silence the arrival of the governor. In a few moments the 
wooden leg of the intrepid Peter was heard in regular and stout- 
hearted thumps upon the staircase. He entered the chamber, 
arrayed in full suit of regimentals, and carrying his trusty 
toledo, not girded on his thigh, but tucked under his arm. As 
the governor never equipped himself in this portentous manner 
unless something of martial nature were working within his 
pericranium, his council regarded him ruefully, as if they saw 
fire and sword in his iron countenance, and forgot to light their 
pipes in breathless suspense. 

His first words were, to rate his council soundly for having 
wasted in idle debate and party feud the time which should 
have been devoted to putting the city in a state of defence. 
He was particularly indignant at those brawlers who had dis- 
graced the councils of the province by empty bickerings and 
scurrilous invectives against an absent enemy. He now called 
upon them to make good their words by deeds, as the enemy 
they had defied and derided was at the gate. Finally, he in- 
formed them of the summons he had received to surrender, but 
concluded by swearing to defend the province as long as 
Heaven was on his side and he had a wooden leg to stand upon; 
which warlike sentence he emphasized by a thwack with the 
flat of his sword upon the table, that quite electrified his 
auditors. 

/"The privy councillors, who had long since been brought into 
as perfect discipline as were ever the soldiers of the great 
Frederick, knew there was no use in saying a word, — so lighted 
their pipes, and smoked away in silence, like fat and discreet 
councillors. But the burgomasters, being inflated with consid- 
erable importance and self-sufficiency, acquired at popular 
meetings, were not so easily satisfied. Mustering up fresh 
spirit, when they found there was some chance of escaping from 



PETER THE HEADSTRONG 43 

their present jeopardy without the disagreeable alternative of 
fighting, they requested a copy of the summons to surrender, 
that they might show it to a general meeting of the people. 

So insolent and mutinous a request would have been enough 
to have roused the gorge of the tranquil Van Twiller himself, — 
what then must have been its effect upon the great Stuyvesant, 
who was not only a Dutchman, a governor and a valiant 
wooden-legged soldier to boot, but withal a man of the most 
stomachful and gunpowder disposition? He burst forth into a 
blaze of indignation, — swore not a mother's son of them 
should see a syllable of it, — that as to their advice or concur- 
rence, he did not care a whiff of tobacco for either, — that they 
might go home, and go to bed like old women; for he was deter- 
mined to defend the colony himself, without the assistance of 
them or their adherents ! So saying he tucked his sword under 
his arm, cocked his hat upon his head, and girding up his loins, 
stumped indignantly out of the council-chamber, everybody 
making room for him as he passed. 

No sooner was he gone than the busy burgomasters called a 
public meeting in front of the Stadthouse, where they appointed 
as chairman one Dofue Roerback, formerly a meddlesome 
member of the cabinet during the reign of William the Testy, 
but kicked out of office by Peter Stuyvesant on taking the reins 
of government. He was, withal, a mighty gingerbread baker 
in the land, and reverenced by the populace as a man of dark 
knowledge, seeing that he was the first to imprint New-Year 
cakes with the mysterious hieroglyphics of the Cock and 
Breeches, and such like magical devices. 

This burgomaster, who still chewed the cud of ill-will against 
Peter Stuyvesant, addressed the multitude in what is called 
a patriotic speech, informing them of the courteous summons 
which the governor had received, to surrender, of his refusal to 
comply therewith, and of his denying the public even a sight of 
the summons, which doubtless contained conditions highly to 
the honor and advantage of the province. 

He then proceeded to speak of his Excellency in high- 
sounding terms of vituperation, suited to the dignity of his 
station; comparing him to Nero, Caligula, and other flagrant 
great men of yore; assuring the people that the history of the 
world did not contain a despotic outrage equal to the present. 



44 WASHINGTON IRVING 

That it would be recorded in letters of fire, on the blood-stained 
tablet of history! That ages would roll back with sudden horror 
when they came to view it! That the womb of time (by the 
way, your orators and writers take strange liberties with the 
womb of time, though some would fain have us believe that 
time is an old gentleman) — that the womb of time, pregnant 
as it was with direful horrors, would never produce a parallel 
enormity! — with a variety of other heart-rending, soul-stirring 
tropes and figures, which I cannot enumerate; neither, indeed, 
need I, for they were of the kind which even to the present day 
form the style of popular harangues and patriotic orations, and 
maybe classed in rhetoric under the general title of Rigmarole. 
The result of this speech of the inspired burgomaster was 
a memorial addressed to the governor, remonstrating in good 
round terms on his conduct. It was proposed that Dofue Roer- 
back himself should be the bearer of this memorial ; but this 
he warily declined, having no inclination of coming again 
within kicking distance of his Excellency. Who did deliver it 
has never been named in history, in which neglect he has suf- 
fered grievous wrong; seeing that he was equally worthy of 
blazon with him perpetuated in Scottish song and story by 
the surname of Bell-the-cat. 1 All we know of the fate of this 
memorial is, that it was used by the grim Peter to light his pipe; 
which, from the vehemence with which he smoked it, was evi- 
dently anything but a pipe of peace. 

CONTAINING A DOLEFUL DISASTER OF ANTONY THE TRUMPETER, 
AND HOW PETER STUYVESANT, LIKE A SECOND CROMWELL, 
SUDDENLY DISSOLVED A RUMP PARLIAMENT 

Now did the high-minded Pieter de Groodt shower down a 
pannier-load of maledictions upon his burgomasters for a set 
of self-willed, obstinate, factious varlets, who would neither 
be convinced nor persuaded. Nor did he omit to bestow some 
left-handed compliments upon the sovereign people, as a herd 
of poltroons, who had no relish for the glorious hardships and 
illustrious misadventures of battle, but would rather stay at 
home, and eat and sleep in ignoble ease, than fight in a ditch 
for immortality and a broken head. 

1 Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus. 



PETER THE HEADSTRONG 45 

Resolutely bent, however, upon defending his beloved city, 
in despite even of itself, he called unto him his trusty Van 
Corlear, who was his right-hand man in all times of emergency. 
Him did he adjure to take his war-denouncing trumpet, and 
mounting his horse, to beat up the country night and day, — 
sounding the alarm along the pastoral borders of the Bronx, — 
startling the wild solitudes of Croton — arousing the rugged 
yeomanry of Weehawk and Hoboken, — the mighty men of 
battle of Tappan Bay, — and the brave boys of Tarry-Town, 
Petticoat-Lane, and Sleepy-Hollow, — charging them one and 
all to sling their powder-horns, shoulder their fowling-pieces, 
and march merrily down to the Manhattoes. 

Now there was nothing in all the world, the divine sex ex- 
cepted, that Antony Van Corlear loved better than errands 
of this kind. So just stopping to take a lusty dinner, and brac- 
ing to his side his junk-bottle, well charged with heart-inspiring 
Hollands, he issued jollily from the city gate, which looked out 
upon what is at present called Broadway, sounding a farewell 
strain, that rung in sprightly echoes through the winding 
streets of New Amsterdam. Alas! never more were they to be 
gladdened by the melody of their favorite trumpeter ! 

It was a dark and stormy night when the good Antony 
arrived at the creek (sagely denominated Haerlem river) which 
separates the island of Manna-hata from the mainland. The 
wind was high, the elements were in an uproar, and no Charon 
could be found to ferry the adventurous sounder of brass across 
the water. For a short time he vapored like an impatient ghost 
upon the brink, and then bethinking himself of the urgency of 
his errand, took a hearty embrace of his stone bottle, swore most 
valorously that he would swim across in spite of the devil! 
(Spyt den Duyvel!) and daringly plunged into the stream. 
Luckless Antony! Scarce had he buffeted half-way over when 
he was observed to struggle violently, as if battling with the 
spirit of the waters, — instinctively he put his trumpet to his 
mouth, and giving a vehement blast — sank forever to the 
bottom ! 

The clangor of his trumpet, like that of the ivory horn of the 
renowned Paladin Orlando, 1 when expiring in the glorious field 
of Roncesvalles, rang far and wide through the country, alarm- 
1 Roland, hero of the Chanson de Roland. 



46 WASHINGTON IRVING 

ing the neighbors round, who hurried in amazement to the 
spot. Here an old Dutch burgher, famed for his veracity, and 
who had been a witness of the fact, related to them the melan- 
choly affair; with the fearful addition (to which I am slow in 
giving belief) that he saw the duyvel, in the shape of a huge 
moss-bonker, seize the sturdy Antony by the leg, and drag him 
beneath the waves. Certain it is, the place, with the adjoining 
promontory, which projects into the Hudson, has been called 
Spyt den Duyvel ever since ; the ghost of the unfortunate Antony 
still haunts the surrounding solitudes, and his trumpet has 
often been heard by the neighbors, of a stormy night, mingling 
with the howling of the blast. Nobody ever attempts to swim 
across the creek after dark; on the contrary, a bridge has been 
built to guard against such melancholy accidents in future; and 
as to the moss-bonkers, they are held in such abhorrence, that 
no true Dutchman will admit them to his table, who loves good 
fish and hates the devil. 

Such was the end of Antony Van Corlear, — a man deserv- 
ing of a better fate. He lived roundly and soundly, like a true 
and jolly bachelor, until the day of his death; but though he 
was never married, yet did he leave behind some two or three 
dozen children, in different parts of the country, — fine, 
chubby, brawling, flatulent little urchins; from whom, if legends 
speak true (and they are not apt to lie), did descend the innu- 
merable race of editors, who people and defend this country, 
and who are bountifully paid by the people for keeping up a 
constant alarm — and making them miserable. 

As some way-worn pilgrim, when the tempest whistles 
through his locks, and night is gathering round, beholds his 
faithful dog, the companion and solace of his journeying, 
stretched lifeless at his feet, so did the generous-hearted hero 
of the Manhattoes contemplate the untimely end of Antony 
Van Corlear. He had been the faithful attendant of his foot- 
steps; he had charmed him in many a weary hour by his honest 
gayety and the martial melody of his trumpet, and had fol- 
lowed him with unflinching loyalty and affection through many 
a scene of direful peril and mishap. He was gone forever! and 
that, too, at a moment when every mongrel cur was skulking 
from his side. This — Peter Stuyvesant — was the moment to 



PETER THE HEADSTRONG 47 

try thy fortitude; and this was the moment when thou didst 
indeed shine forth Peter the Headstrong! 

The glare of day had long dispelled the horrors of the stormy 
night ; still all was dull and gloomy. The late jovial Apollo hid 
his face behind lugubrious clouds, peeping out now and then 
for an instant, as if anxious, yet fearful, to see what was going 
on in his favorite city. This was the eventful morning when the 
great Peter was to give his reply to the summons of the invad- 
ers. Already was he closeted with his privy council, sitting in 
grim state, brooding over the fate of his favorite trumpeter, 
and anon boiling with indignation as the insolence of his recre- 
ant burgomasters flashed upon his mind. — While in this state 
of irritation, a courier arrived in all haste from Winthrop, the 
subtle governor of Connecticut, counselling him, in the most 
affectionate and disinterested manner, to surrender the prov- 
ince, and magnifying the dangers and calamities to which a 
refusal would subject him. — What a moment was this to in- 
trude officious advice upon a man who never took advice in his 
whole life ! — The fiery old governor strode up and down the 
chamber with a vehemence that made the bosoms of his coun- 
cillors to quake with awe, — railing at his unlucky fate, that 
thus made him the constant butt of factious subjects, and 
Jesuitical advisers. 

Just at this ill-chosen juncture, the officious burgomasters, 
who had heard of the arrival of mysterious dispatches, came 
marching in a body into the room, with a legion of schepens 
and toad-eaters at their heels, and abruptly demanded a peru- 
sal of the letter. This was too much for the spleen of Peter 
Stuyvesant. He tore the letter in a thousand pieces, — threw 
it in the face of the nearest burgomaster, — broke his pipe over 
the head of the next, — hurled his spitting-box at an unlucky 
schepen, who was just retreating out at the door, and finally 
prorogued the whole meeting sine die, by kicking them down- 
stairs with his wooden leg. 

As soon as the burgomasters could recover from their con- 
fusion and had time to breathe, they called a public meeting, 
where they related at full length, and with appropriate coloring 
and exaggeration, the despotic and vindictive deportment of 
the governor; declaring that, for their own parts, they did not 
value a straw the being kicked, cuffed, and mauled by the tim- 



48 WASHINGTON IRVING 

ber toe of his Excellency, but that they felt for the dignity of 
the sovereign people, thus rudely insulted by the outrage com- 
mitted on the seat of honor of their representatives. The latter 
part of the harangue came home at once to that delicacy of 
feeling and jealous pride of character vested in all true mobs, 

— who, though they may bear injuries without a murmur, yet 
are marvellously jealous of their sovereign dignity; and there is 
no knowing to what act of resentment they might have been 
provoked, had they not been somewhat more afraid of their 
sturdy old governor than they were of St. Nicholas, the English 

— or the d — 1 himself. 



HOW PETER STUYVESANT DEFENDED THE CITY OF NEW AMSTER- 
DAM FOR SEVERAL DAYS, BY DINT OF THE STRENGTH OF 
HIS HEAD 

There is something exceedingly sublime and melancholy in 
the spectacle which the present crisis of our history presents. 
An illustrious and venerable little city, — the metropolis of a 
vast extent of uninhabited country, — garrisoned by a doughty 
host of orators, chairmen, committee-men, burgomasters, sche- 
pens, and old women, — governed by a determined and strong- 
headed warrior, and fortified by mud batteries, palisadoes, and 
resolutions, — blockaded by sea, beleaguered by land, and 
threatened with direful desolation from without, while its very 
vitals are torn with internal faction and commotion! Never 
did historic pen record a page of more complicated distress, 
unless it be the strife that distracted the Israelites, during the 
siege of Jerusalem, — where discordant parties were cutting 
each other's throats, at the moment when the victorious legions 
of Titus had toppled down their bulwarks, and were carrying 
fire and sword into the very sanctum sanctorum of the temple. 

Governor Stuyvesant having triumphantly put his grand 
council to the rout, and delivered himself from a multitude of 
impertinent advisers, dispatched a categorical reply to the 
commanders of the invading squadron; wherein he asserted 
the right and title of their High Mightinesses the Lords States 
General to the province of New Netherlands, and trusting in 
the righteousness of his cause, set the whole British nation at 
defiance ! 



PETER THE HEADSTRONG 49 

My anxiety to extricate my readers and myself from these 
disastrous scenes prevents me from giving the whole of this 
gallant letter, which concluded in these manly and affectionate 
terms : — 

As touching the threats in your conclusion, we have nothing to 
answer, only that we fear nothing but what God (who is as just as 
merciful) shall lay upon us; all things being in his gracious disposal, 
and we may as well be preserved by him with small forces as by a 
great army ; which makes us to wish you all happiness and prosperity, 
and recommend you to his protection. My lords, your thrice humble 
and affectionate servant and friend, 

P. Stuyvesant. 

Thus having thrown his gantlet, the brave Peter stuck a 
pair of horse-pistols in his belt, girded an immense powder- 
horn on his side, — thrust his sound leg into a Hessian boot, 
and clapping his fierce little war-hat on the top of his head, — 
paraded up and down in front of his house, determined to de- 
fend his beloved city to the last. 

While all these struggles and dissensions were prevailing in 
the unhappy city of New Amsterdam, and while its worthy but 
ill-starred governor was framing the above-quoted letter, the 
English commanders did not remain idle. They had agents 
secretly employed to foment the fears and clamors of the popu- 
lace; and moreover circulated far and wide, through the adja- 
cent country, a proclamation, repeating the terms they had 
already held out in their summons to surrender, at the same 
time beguiling the simple Nederlanders with the most crafty 
and conciliating professions. They promised that every man 
who voluntarily submitted to the authority of his British 
Majesty should retain peaceful possession of his house, his 
vrouw, and his cabbage-garden. That he should be suffered to 
smoke his pipe, speak Dutch, wear as many breeches as he 
pleased, and import bricks, tiles, and stone jugs from Holland, 
instead of manufacturing them on the spot. That he should on 
no account be compelled to learn the English language, nor eat 
codfish on Saturdays, nor keep accounts in any other way than 
by casting them up on his fingers, and chalking them down 
upon the crown of his hat; as is observed among the Dutch 
yeomanry at the present day. That every man should be 
allowed quietly to inherit his father's hat, coat, shoe-buckles, 



5 o WASHINGTON IRVING 

pipe, and every other personal appendage; and that no man 
should be obliged to conform to any improvements, inventions, 
or any other modern innovations; but, on the contrary should 
be permitted to build his house, follow his trade, manage his 
farm, rear his hogs, and educate his children, precisely as his 
ancestors had done before him from time immemorial. Finally, 
that he should have all the benefits of free trade, and should 
not be required to acknowledge any other saint in the calendar 
than St. Nicholas, who should thenceforward, as before, be 
considered the tutelar saint of the city. 

These terms, as may be supposed, appeared very satisfactory 
to the people, who had a great disposition to enjoy their prop- 
erty unmolested, and a most singular aversion to engage in a 
contest, where they could gain little more than honor and 
broken heads, — the first of which they held in philosophic 
indifference, the latter in utter detestation. By these insidious 
means, therefore, did the English succeed in alienating the 
confidence and affections of the populace from their gallant old 
governor, whom they considered as obstinately bent upon 
running them into hideous misadventures; and did not hesitate 
to speak their minds freely, and abuse him most heartily — 
behind his back. 

Like as a mighty grampus when assailed and buffeted by 
roaring waves and brawling surges, still keeps on an undeviat- 
ing course, rising above the boisterous billows, spouting and 
blowing as he emerges, — so did the inflexible Peter pursue, 
unwavering, his determined career, and rise, contemptuous, 
above the clamors of the rabble. 

But when the British warriors found that he set their power 
at defiance, they dispatched recruiting officers to Jamaica, and 
Jericho, and Nineveh, and Quag, and Patchog, and all those 
towns on Long Island which had been subdued of yore by 
S toff el Brinkerhoff; stirring up the progeny of Preserved Fish, 
and Determined Cock, and those other New-England squatters, 
to assail the city of New Amsterdam by land, while the hostile 
ships prepared for an assault by water. 

The streets of New Amsterdam now presented a scene of wild 
dismay and consternation. In vain did Peter Stuyvesant order 
the citizens to arm and assemble on the Battery. Blank terror 
reigned over the community. The whole party of Short Pipes 



PETER THE HEADSTRONG 51 

in the course of a single night had changed into arrant old 
women, — a metamorphosis only to be paralleled by the prodi- 
gies recorded by Livy as having happened at Rome at the ap- 
proach of Hannibal, when statues sweated in pure affright, 
goats were converted into sheep, and cocks, turning into hens, 
ran cackling about the street. 

Thus baffled in all attempts to put the city in a state of 
defence, blockaded from without, tormented from within, and 
menaced with a Yankee invasion, even the stiff-necked will of 
Peter Stuyvesant for once gave way, and in spite of his mighty 
heart, which swelled in his throat until it nearly choked him, 
he consented to a treaty of surrender. 

Words cannot express the transports of the populace, on 
receiving this intelligence; had they obtained a conquest over 
their enemies, they could not have indulged greater delight. 
The streets resounded with their congratulations, — they ex- 
tolled their governor as the father and deliverer of his country, 

— they crowded to his house to testify their gratitude, and 
were ten times more noisy in their plaudits than when he re- 
turned, with victory perched upon his beaver, from the glorious 
capture of Fort Christina. But the indignant Peter shut his 
doors and windows, and took refuge in the innermost recesses 
of his mansion, that he might not hear the ignoble rejoicings of 
the rabble. 

Commissioners were now appointed on both sides, and a 
capitulation was speedily arranged; all that was wanting to 
ratify it was that it should be signed by the governor. When 
the commissioners waited upon him for this purpose, they were 
received with grim and bitter courtesy. His warlike accoutre- 
ments were laid aside, — an old Indian night-gown was 
wrapped about his rugged limbs, a red night-cap overshadowed 
his frowning brow, an iron-gray beard of three days' growth 
gave additional grimness to his visage. Thrice did he seize a 
worn-out stump of a pen, and essay to sign the loathsome paper 

— thrice did he clinch his teeth, and make a horrible counte- 
nance, as though a dose of rhubarb, senna, and ipecacuanha 
had been offered to his lips; at length, dashing it from him, he 
seized his brass-hilted sword, and jerking it from the scabbard, 
swore by St. Nicholas, to sooner die than yield to any power 
under heaven. 



52 WASHINGTON IRVING 

For two whole days he did persist in this magnanimous reso- 
lution, during which his house was besieged by the rabble, and 
menaces and clamorous revilings exhausted to no purpose. 
And now another course was adopted to soothe, if possible, his 
mighty ire. A procession was formed by the burgomasters and 
schepens, followed by the populace, to bear the capitulation 
in state to the governor's dwelling. They found the castle 
strongly barricadoed, and the old hero in full regimentals, with 
his cocked hat on his head, posted with a blunderbuss at the 
garret-window. 

There was something in this formidable position that struck 
even the ignoble vulgar with awe and admiration. The brawl- 
ing multitude could not but reflect with self-abasement upon 
their own pusillanimous conduct, when they beheld their 
hardy but deserted old governor, thus faithful to his post, like 
a forlorn hope, and fully prepared to defend his ungrateful city 
to the last. These compunctions, however, were soon over- 
whelmed by the recurring tide of public apprehension. The 
populace arranged themselves before the house, taking off their 
hats with most respectful humility; Burgomaster Roerback, 
who was of that popular class of orators described by Sallust as 
being "talkative rather than eloquent," stepped forth and 
addressed the governor in a speech of three hours' length, de- 
tailing, in the most pathetic terms, the calamitous situation of 
the province, and urging him in a constant repetition of the 
same arguments and words to sign the capitulation. 

The mighty Peter eyed him from his garret-window in grim 
silence, — now and then his eye would glance over the sur- 
rounding rabble, and an indignant grin, like that of an angry 
mastiff would mark his iron visage. But though a man of most 
undaunted mettle, — though he had a heart as big as an ox, 
and a head that would have set adamant to scorn, — yet after 
all he was a mere mortal. Wearied out by these repeated oppo- 
sitions, and this eternal haranguing, and perceiving that unless 
he complied, the inhabitants would follow their own inclina- 
tion, or rather their fears, without waiting for his consent, or, 
what was still worse, the Yankees would have time to pour in 
their forces and claim a share in the conquest, he testily ordered 
them to hand up the paper. It was accordingly hoisted to him 
on the end of a pole; and having scrawled his name at the bot- 



PETER THE HEADSTRONG 53 

torn of it, he anathematized them all for a set of cowardly, 
mutinous, degenerate poltroons, threw the capitulation at their 
heads, slammed down the window, and was heard stumping 
down-stairs with vehement indignation. The rabble inconti- 
nently took to their heels ; even the burgomasters were not slow 
in evacuating the premises, fearing lest the sturdy Peter might 
issue from his den, and greet them with some unwelcome testi- 
monial of his displeasure. 

Within three hours after the surrender, a legion of British 
beef -fed warriors poured into New Amsterdam, taking posses- 
sion of the fort and batteries. And now might be heard, from 
all quarters, the sound of hammers made by the old Dutch 
burghers, in nailing up their doors and windows, to protect 
their vrouws from these fierce barbarians, whom they contem- 
plated in silent sullenness from the garret-windows as they 
paraded through the streets. 

Thus did Colonel Richard Nichols, the commander of the 
British forces, enter into quiet possession of the conquered 
realm as locum tenens for the Duke of York. The victory was 
attended with no other outrage than that of changing the 
name of the province and its metropolis, which thenceforth 
were denominated New York, and so have continued to be 
called unto the present day. The inhabitants, according to 
treaty, were allowed to maintain quiet possession of their prop- 
erty; but so inveterately did they retain their abhorrence of 
the British nation, that in a private meeting of the leading citi- 
zens it was unanimously determined never to ask any of their 
conquerors to dinner. 

NOTE 

Modern historians assert that when the New Netherlands were thus 
overrun by the British, as Spain in ancient days by the Saracens, a reso- 
lute band refused to bend the neck to the invader. Led by one Garret 
Van Home, a valorous and gigantic Dutchman, they crossed the bay and 
buried themselves among the marshes and cabbage-gardens of Communi- 
paw; as did Pelayo and his followers among the mountains of Asturias. 
Here their descendants have remained ever since, keeping themselves 
apart, like seed-corn, to re-people the city with the genuine breed when- 
ever it shall be effectually recovered from its intruders. It is said the gen- 
uine descendants of the Nederlanders who inhabit New York, still look 
with longing eyes to the green marshes of ancient Pavonia, as did the con- 
quered Spaniards of yore to the stern mountains of Asturias, considering 
these the regions whence deliverance is to come. 



54 WASHINGTON IRVING 

THE AUTHOR'S ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF 1 

" I am of this mind with Homer, that as the snaile that crept out of her shel was turned 
eftsoones into a toad, and thereby was forced to make a stoole to sit on; so the traveller 
that stragleth from his owne country is in a short time transformed into so mon- 
strous a shape, that he is faine to alter his mansion with his manners, and to live where 
he can, not where he would." (Lyly's Euphues.) 

I was always fond of visiting new scenes, and observing 
strange characters and manners. Even when a rriere child I 
began my travels, and made many tours of discovery into for- 
eign parts and unknown regions of my native city, to the fre- 
quent alarm of my parents, and the emolument of the town 
crier. As I grew into boyhood, I extended the range of my 
observations. My holiday afternoons were spent in rambles 
about the surrounding country. I made myself familiar with 
all its places famous in history or fable. I knew every spot 
where a murder or robbery had been committed, or a ghost 
seen. I visited the neighboring villages, and added greatly to 
my stock of knowledge, by noting their habits and customs, 
and conversing with their savages and great men. I even jour- 
neyed one long summer's day to the summit of the most dis- 
tant hill, whence I stretched my eye over many a mile of terra 
incognita, and was astonished to find how vast a globe I in- 
habited. 

This rambling propensity strengthened with my years. 
Books of voyages and travels became my passion, and in de- 
vouring their contents, I neglected the regular exercises of the 
school. How wistfully would I wander about the pier-heads in 
fine weather, and watch the parting ships, bound to distant 
climes — with what longing eyes would I gaze after their les- 
sening sails, and waft myself in imagination to the ends of the 
earth! 

Further reading and thinking, though they brought this 
vague inclination into more reasonable bounds, only served to 
make it more decided. I visited various parts of my own coun- 
try; and had I been merely a lover of fine scenery, I should 
have felt little desire to seek elsewhere its gratification: for on 

1 Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. The sketches were originally published 
in seven parts, between May, 1819, and September, 1820. As Irving predicted 
while writing in England, his papers partook "of the fluctuations of his own 
thoughts and feelings — sometimes treating of scenes before him, sometimes of 
others purely imaginary, and sometimes wandering back with his recollections to 
his native country." (Prospectus accompanying the first number.) 



THE AUTHOR'S ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF 55 

no country had the charms of nature been more prodigally 
lavished. Her mighty lakes, like oceans of liquid silver; her 
mountains, with their bright aerial tints; her valleys, teeming 
with wild fertility; her tremendous cataracts, thundering in 
their solitudes; her boundless plains, waving with spontaneous 
verdure ; her broad deep rivers, rolling in solemn silence to the 
ocean; her trackless forests, where vegetation puts forth all its 
magnificence; her skies, kindling with the magic of summer 
clouds and glorious sunshine, — no, never need an American 
look beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful of 
natural scenery. 

But Europe held forth the charms of storied and poetical 
association. There were to be seen the masterpieces of art, the 
refinements of highly cultivated society, the quaint peculiari- 
ties of ancient and local custom. My native country was full of 
youthful promise; Europe was rich in the accumulated treas- 
ures of age. Her very ruins told the history of times gone by, 
and every mouldering stone was a chronicle. I longed to wan- 
der over the scenes of renowned achievement — to tread, as it 
were, in the footsteps of antiquity — to loiter about the ruined 
castle — to meditate on the falling tower — to escape, in short, 
from the common-place realities of the present, and lose my- 
self among the shadowy grandeurs of the past. 

I had, besides all this, an earnest desire to see the great men 
of the earth. We have, it is true, our great men in America: 
not a city but has an ample share of them. I have mingled 
among them in my time, and been almost withered by the 
shade into which they cast me; for there is nothing so baleful 
to a small man as the shade of a great one, particularly the 
great man of a city. But I was anxious to see the great men of 
Europe; for I had read in the works of various philosophers, 
that all animals degenerated in America, and man among the 
number. A great man of Europe, thought I, must therefore 
be as superior to a great man of America, as a peak of the Alps 
to a highland of the Hudson; and in this idea I was confirmed, 
by observing the comparative importance and swelling magni- 
tude of many English travellers among us, who, I was assured, 
were very little people in their own country. I will visit this 
land of wonders, thought I, and see the gigantic race from 
which I am degenerated. 



56 WASHINGTON IRVING 

It has been either my good or evil lot to have my roving 
passion gratified. I have wandered through different countries 
and witnessed many of the shifting scenes of life. I cannot say 
that I have studied them with the eye of a philosopher, but 
rather with the sauntering gaze with which humble lovers of 
the picturesque stroll from the window of one print-shop to 
another; caught sometimes by the delineations of beauty, 
sometimes by the distortions of caricature, and sometimes by 
the loveliness of landscape. As it is the fashion for modern 
tourists to travel pencil in hand, and bring home their port- 
folios filled with sketches, I am disposed to get up a few for the 
entertainment of my friends. When, however, I look over the 
hints and memorandums I have taken down for the purpose 
my heart almost fails me, at finding how my idle humor has 
led me aside from the great object studied by every regular 
traveller who would make a book. I fear I shall give equal dis- 
appointment with an unlucky landscape-painter, who had trav- 
elled on the continent, but, following the bent of his vagrant 
inclination, had sketched in nooks, and corners, and by-places. 
His sketch book was accordingly crowded with cottages, and 
landscapes, and obscure ruins; but he had neglected to paint 
St. Peter's, or the Coliseum; the cascade of Terni, or the bay of 
Naples; and had not a single glacier or volcano in his whole 
collection. 

WESTMINSTER ABBEY 1 

When I behold, with deep astonishment, 
To famous Westminster how there resorte 
Living in brasse or stoney monument, 
The princes and the worthies of all sorte; 
Doe not I see reformde nobilitie, 
Without contempt, or pride, or ostentation, 
And looke upon oflenselesse majesty, 
Naked of pomp or earthly domination? 
And how a play-game of a painted stone 
Contents the quiet now and silent sprites, 
Whome all the world which late they stood upon 
Could not content nor quench their appetites. 

Life is a frost of cold felicitie, 

And death the thaw of all our vanitie. 

Cheistolero's Epigrams, by T. B. (1598.) 

On one of those sober and rather melancholy days, in the 
latter part of autumn, when the shadows of morning and eve- 
ning almost mingle together, and throw a gloom over the decline 

1 Sketch-Book. 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY 57 

of the year, I passed several hours in rambling about West- 
minster Abbey. There was something congenial to the season 
in the mournful magnificence of the old pile; and as I passed 
its threshold, it seemed like stepping back, into the regions of 
antiquity, and losing myself among the shades of former 
ages. 

I entered from the inner court of Westminster School, 
through a long, low, vaulted passage, that had an almost sub- 
terranean look, being dimly lighted in one part by circular per- 
forations in the massive walls. Through this dark avenue I 
had a distant view of the cloisters, with the figure of an old 
verger, in his black gown, moving along their shadowy vaults, 
and seeming like a spectre from one of the neighboring tombs. 

The approach to the abbey through these gloomy monastic 
remains prepares the mind for its solemn contemplation. The 
cloisters still retain something of the quiet and seclusion of 
former days. The gray walls are discolored by damps, and 
crumbling with age; a coat of hoary moss has gathered over 
the inscriptions of the mural monuments, and obscured the 
death's heads and other funereal emblems. The sharp touches 
of the chisel are gone from the rich tracery of the arches; the 
roses which adorned the key-stones have lost their leafy beauty; 
everything bears marks of the gradual dilapidations of time, 
which yet has something touching and pleasing in its very 
decay. 

The sun was pouring down a yellow autumnal ray into the 
square of the cloisters; beaming upon a scanty plot of grass in 
the centre, and lighting up an angle of the vaulted passage 
with a kind of dusty splendor. From between the arcades, the 
eye glanced up to a bit of blue sky or a passing cloud, and be- 
held the sun-gilt pinnacles of the abbey towering into the 
azure heaven. 

As I paced the cloisters, sometimes contemplating this min- 
gled picture of glory and decay, and sometimes endeavoring 
to decipher the inscriptions on the tombstones, which formed 
the pavement beneath my feet, my eye was attracted to three 
figures, rudely carved in relief, but nearly worn away by the 
footsteps of many generations. They were the effigies of three 
of the early abbots; the epitaphs were entirely effaced; the 
names alone remained, having no doubt been renewed in later 



58 WASHINGTON IRVING 

times. (Vitalis. Abbas. 1082, and Gislebertus Crispinus. Abbas. 
1 1 14, and Laurentius. Abbas. 11 76.) I remained some little 
while, musing over these casual relics of antiquity, thus left 
like wrecks upon this distant shore of time, telling no tale but 
that such beings had been and had perished ; teaching no moral 
but the futility of that pride which hopes still to exact homage 
in its ashes, and to live in an inscription. A little longer, and 
even these faint records will be obliterated, and the monument 
will cease to be a memorial. Whilst I was yet looking down 
upon these gravestones, I was roused by the sound of the abbey 
clock, reverberating from buttress to buttress, and echoing 
among the cloisters. It is almost startling to hear this warning 
of departed time sounding among the tombs, and telling the 
lapse of the hour, which, like a billow, has rolled us onward 
towards the grave. 

I pursued my walk to an arched door opening to the interior 
of the abbey. On entering here, the magnitude of the building 
breaks fully upon the mind, contrasted with the vaults of the 
cloisters. The eyes gaze with wonder at clustered columns of 
gigantic dimensions, with arches springing from them to such 
an amazing height; and man wandering about their bases, 
shrunk into insignificance in comparison with his own handi- 
work. The spaciousness and gloom of this vast edifice produce 
a profound and mysterious awe. We step cautiously and softly 
about, as if fearful of disturbing the hallowed silence of the 
tomb; while every footfall whispers along the walls, and chat- 
ters among the sepulchres, making us more sensible of the 
quiet we have interrupted. 

It seems as if the awful nature of the place presses down upon 
the soul, and hushes the beholder into noiseless reverence. We 
feel that we are surrounded by the congregated bones of the 
great men of past times, who have filled history with their 
deeds and the earth with their renown. And yet, it almost pro- 
vokes a smile at the vanity of human ambition, to see how they 
are crowded together and jostled in the dust; what parsimony 
is observed in doling out a scanty nook, a gloomy corner, a 
little portion of earth, to those whom, when alive, kingdoms 
could not satisfy; and how many shapes, and forms, and arti- 
fices, are devised to catch the casual notice of the passenger, 
and save from forgetfulness, for a few short years, a name 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY 59 

which once aspired to occupy ages of the world's thought and 
admiration. 

I passed some time in Poets' Corner, which occupies an end 
of one of the transepts or cross aisles of the abbey. The monu- 
ments are generally simple; for the lives. of literary men afford 
no striking themes for the sculptor. Shakespeare and Addison 
have statues erected to their memories; but the greater part 
have busts, medallions, and sometimes mere inscriptions. Not- 
withstanding the simplicity of these memorials, I have always 
observed that the visitors to the abbey remain longest about 
them. A kinder and fonder feeling takes place of that cold 
curiosity or vague admiration with which they gaze on the 
splendid monuments of the great and the heroic. They linger 
about these as about the tombs of friends and companions ; for 
indeed there is something of companionship between the author 
and the reader. Other men are known to posterity only through 
the medium of history, which is continually growing faint and 
obscure ; but the intercourse between the author and his fellow- 
men is ever new, active, and immediate. He has lived for them 
more than for himself; he has sacrificed surrounding enjoy- 
ments, and shut himself up from the delights of social life, that 
he might the more intimately commune with distant minds 
and distant ages. Well may the world cherish his renown; for 
it has been purchased, not by deeds of violence and blood, but 
by the diligent dispensation of pleasure. Well may posterity 
be grateful to his memory; for he has left it an inheritance, not 
of empty names and sounding actions, but whole treasures of 
wisdom, bright gems of thought, and golden veins of language. 

From Poets' Corner I continued my stroll towards that part 
of the abbey which contains the sepulchres of the kings. I wan- 
dered among what once were chapels, but which are now occu- 
pied by the tombs and monuments of the great. At every turn, 
I met with some illustrious name, or the cognizance of some 
powerful house renowned in history. As the eye darts into 
these dusky chambers of death, it catches glimpses of quaint 
effigies: some kneeling in niches, as if in devotion; others 
stretched upon the tombs, with hands piously pressed together; 
warriors in armor, as if reposing after battle; prelates, with 
crosiers and mitres; and nobles in robes and coronets, lying as 
it were in state. In glancing over this scene, so strangely popu- 



60 WASHINGTON IRVING 

lous, yet where every form is so still and silent, it seems almost 
as if we were treading a mansion of that fabled city where 
every being had been suddenly transmuted into stone. 1 

I paused to contemplate a tomb on which lay the efhgy of 
a knight in complete armor. A large buckler was on one arm ; 
the hands were pressed together in supplication upon the breast; 
the face was almost covered by the morion; the legs were 
crossed in token of the warrior's having been engaged in the 
holy war. It was the tomb of a crusader; of one of those mili- 
tary enthusiasts who so strangely mingled religion and romance, 
and whose exploits form the connecting link between fact and 
fiction, between the history and the fairy tale. There is some- 
thing extremely picturesque in the tombs of these adventurers, 
decorated as they are with rude armorial bearings and Gothic 
sculpture. They comport with the antiquated chapels in which 
they are generally found; and in considering them, the imagina- 
tion is apt to kindle with the legendary associations, the roman- 
tic fiction, the chivalrous pomp and pageantry, which poetry 
has spread over the wars for the sepulchre of Christ. They are 
the relics of times utterly gone by; of beings passed from recol- 
lection; of customs and manners with which ours have no affin- 
ity. They are like objects from some strange and distant land, 
of which we have no certain knowledge, and about which all 
our conceptions are vague and visionary. There is something 
extremely solemn and awful in those effigies on Gothic tombs, 
extended as if in the sleep of death, or in the supplication of the 
dying hour. They have an effect infinitely more impressive on 
my feelings than the fanciful attitudes, the over-wrought con- 
ceits, and allegorical groups, which abound on modern monu- 
ments. I have been struck, also, with the superiority of many 
of the old sepulchral inscriptions. There was a noble way, in 
former times, of saying things simply, and yet saying them 
proudly; and I do not know an epitaph that breathes a loftier 
consciousness of family worth and honorable lineage, than one 
which affirms, of a noble house, that "all the brothers were 
brave, and all the sisters virtuous." 

In the opposite transept to Poets' Corner stands a monu- 
ment which is among the most renowned achievements of 
modern art; but which to me appears horrible rather than sub- 

1 Arabian Nights' Entertainments, Sixty-fifth Night. 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY 61 

lime. It is the tomb of Mrs. Nightingale, 1 by Roubillac. The 
bottom of the monument is represented as throwing open its 
marble doors, and a sheeted skeleton is starting forth. The 
shroud is falling from his fleshless frame as he launches his dart 
at his victim. She is sinking into her affrighted husband's arms, 
who strives, with vain and frantic effort, to avert the blow. 
The whole is executed with terrible truth and spirit ; we almost 
fancy we hear the gibbering yell of triumph bursting from the 
distended jaws of the spectre. But why should we thus seek 
to clothe death with unnecessary terrors, and to spread horrors 
round the tomb of those we love? The grave should be sur- 
rounded by everything that might inspire tenderness and ven- 
eration for the dead; or that might win the living to virtue. It 
is the place, not of disgust and dismay, but of sorrow and 
meditation. 

While wandering about these gloomy vaults and silent aisles, 
studying the records of the dead, the sound of busy existence 
from without occasionally reaches the ear : the rumbling of the 
passing equipage; the murmur of the multitude; or perhaps the 
light laugh of pleasure. The contrast is striking with the death- 
like repose around; and it has a strange effect upon the feelings, 
thus to hear the surges of active life hurrying along and beating 
against the very walls of the sepulchre. 

I continued in this way to move from tomb to tomb, and 
from chapel to chapel. The day was gradually wearing away; 
the distant tread of loiterers about the abbey grew less and less 
frequent; the sweet-tongued bell was summoning to evening 
prayers; and I saw at a distance the choristers, in their white 
surplices, crossing the aisle and entering the choir. I stood 
before the entrance to Henry the Seventh's chapel. A flight of 
steps lead up to it, through a deep and gloomy, but magnificent 
arch. Great gates of brass, richly and delicately wrought, turn 
heavily upon their hinges, as if proudly reluctant to admit the 
feet of common mortals into this most gorgeous of sepulchres. 

On entering, the eye is astonished by the pomp of architec- 
ture and the elaborate beauty of sculptured detail. The very 
walls are wrought into universal ornament, encrusted with 
tracery, and scooped into niches, crowded with the statues of 

1 Lady Elizabeth Nightingale, who died in 1731. The sculptor was Louis 
Francois Roubillac (or Roubiliac), 1695-1762. 



62 WASHINGTON IRVING 

saints and martyrs. Stone seems, by the cunning labor of the 
chisel, to have been robbed of its weight and density, suspended 
aloft, as if by magic, and the fretted roof achieved with the 
wonderful minuteness and airy security of a cobweb. 

Along the sides of the chapel are the lofty stalls of the 
Knights of the Bath, richly carved of oak, though with the 
grotesque decorations of Gothic architecture. On the pinnacles 
of the stalls are affixed the helmets and crests of the knights, 
with their scarfs and swords; and above them are suspended 
their banners, emblazoned with armorial bearings, and con- 
trasting the splendor of gold and purple and crimson with the 
cold gray fretwork of the roof. In the midst of this grand 
mausoleum stands the sepulchre of its founder, — his effigy, 
with that of his queen, extended on a sumptuous tomb, and the 
whole surrounded by a superbly-wrought brazen railing. 

There is a sad dreariness in this magnificence; this strange 
mixture of tombs and trophies; these emblems of living and 
aspiring ambition, close beside mementos which show the dust 
and oblivion in which all must sooner or later terminate.' 
Nothing impresses the mind with a deeper feeling of loneliness, 
than to tread the silent and deserted scene of former throng 
and pageant. On looking round on the vacant stalls of the 
knights and their esquires, and on the rows of dusty but gor- 
geous banners that were once borne before them, my imagina- 
tion conjured up the scene when this hall was bright with the 
valor and beauty of the land; glittering with the splendor of 
jewelled rank and military array ; alive with the tread of many 
feet, and the hum of an admiring multitude. All had passed 
away; the silence of death had settled again upon the place; 
interrupted only by the casual chirping of birds, which had 
found their way into the chapel, and built their nests among its 
friezes and pendants, — sure signs of solitariness and desertion. 

When I read the names inscribed on the banners, they were 
those of men scattered far and wide about the world; some toss- 
ing upon distant seas; some under arms in distant lands; some 
mingling in the busy intrigues of courts and cabinets; all seek- 
ing to deserve one more distinction in this mansion of shadowy 
honors, — the melancholy reward of a monument. 

Two small aisles on each side of this chapel present a touch- 
ing instance of the equality of the grave, which brings down 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY 63 

the oppressor to a level with the oppressed, and mingles the 
dust of the bitterest enemies together. In one is the sepulchre 
of the haughty Elizabeth; in the other is that of her victim, the 
lovely and unfortunate Mary. Not an hour in the day, but 
some ejaculation of pity is uttered over the fate of the latter, 
mingled with indignation at her oppressor. The walls of Eliza- 
beth's sepulchre continually echo with the sighs of sympathy 
heaved at the grave of her rival. 

A peculiar melancholy reigns over the aisle where Mary lies 
buried. The light struggles dimly through windows darkened 
by dust. The greater part of the place is in deep shadow, and 
the walls are stained and tinted by time and weather. A marble 
figure of Mary is stretched upon the tomb, round which is an 
iron railing, much corroded, bearing her national emblem, the 
thistle. I was weary with wandering, and sat down to rest my- 
self by the monument, revolving in my mind the checkered and 
disastrous story of poor Mary. 

The sound of casual footsteps had ceased from the abbey. 
I could only hear, now and then, the distant voice of the priest 
repeating the evening service, and the faint responses of the 
choir; these paused for a time, and all was hushed. The still- 
ness, the desertion and obscurity that were gradually prevailing 
around, gave a deeper and more solemn interest to the place: 

For in the silent grave no conversation, 
No joyful tread of friends, no voice of lovers, 
No careful father's counsel — nothing 's heard, 
For nothing is, but all oblivion, 
Dust, and an endless darkness. 

Suddenly the notes of the deep-laboring organ burst upon 
the ear, falling with doubled and redoubled intensity, and roll- 
ing, as it were, huge billows of sound. How well do their vol- 
ume and grandeur accord with this mighty building! With 
what pomp do they swell through its vast vaults, and breathe 
their awful harmony through these caves of death, and make 
the silent sepulchre vocal ! — And now they rise in triumphant 
acclamation, heaving higher and higher their accordant notes, 
and piling sound on sound. — And now they pause, and the 
soft voices of the choir break out into sweet gushes of melody; 
they soar aloft, and warble along the roof, and seem to play 
about these lofty vaults like the pure airs of heaven. Again the 



64 WASHINGTON IRVING 

pealing organ heaves its thrilling thunders, compressing air 
into music, and rolling it forth upon the soul. What long-drawn 
cadences ! What solemn sweeping concords ! It grows more and 
more dense and powerful — it fills the vast pile, and seems to 
jar the very walls — the ear is stunned — the senses are over- 
whelmed. And now it is winding up in full jubilee — it is rising 
from the earth to heaven — the very soul seems rapt away, and 
floated upwards on this swelling tide of harmony! 

I sat for some time lost in that kind of reverie which a strain 
of music is apt sometimes to inspire; the shadows of evening 
were gradually thickening around me; the monuments began 
to cast deeper and deeper gloom; and the distant clock again 
gave token of the slowly waning day. 

I rose, and prepared to leave the abbey. As I descended the 
flight of steps which lead into the body of the building, my 
eye was caught by the shrine of Edward the Confessor, and I 
ascended the small staircase that conducts to it, to take from 
thence a general survey of this wilderness of tombs. The shrine 
is elevated upon a kind of platform, and close around it are the 
sepulchres of various kings and queens. From this eminence 
the eye looks down between pillars and funeral trophies to the 
chapels and chambers below, crowded with tombs; where war- 
riors, prelates, courtiers, and statesmen, lie mouldering in their 
"beds of darkness." Close by me stood the great chair of 
coronation, rudely carved of oak, in the barbarous taste of a 
remote and Gothic age. The scene seemed almost as if con- 
trived, with theatrical artifice, to produce an effect upon the 
beholder. Here was a type of the beginning and the end of 
human pomp and power; here it was literally but a step from 
the throne to the sepulchre. Would not one think that these 
incongruous mementos had been gathered together as a lesson 
to living greatness? — to show it, even in the moment of its 
proudest exaltation, the neglect and dishonor to which it must 
soon arrive; how soon that crown which encircles its brow must 
pass away, and it must lie down in the dust and disgraces of 
the tomb, and be trampled upon by the feet of the meanest of 
the multitude. For, strange to tell, even the grave is here no' 
longer a sanctuary. There is a shocking levity in some natures, 
which leads them to sport with awful and hallowed things; and 
there are base minds which delight to revenge on the illustrious 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY 65 

dead the abject homage and grovelling servility which they 
pay to the living. The coffin of Edward the Confessor has been 
broken open, and his remains despoiled of their funereal orna- 
ments; the sceptre has been stolen from the hand of the imperi- 
ous Elizabeth, and the effigy of Henry the Fifth lies headless. 
Not a royal monument but bears some proof how false and fugi- 
tive is the homage of mankind. Some are plundered, some muti- 
lated ; some covered with ribaldry and insult, — all more or less 
outraged and dishonored! 

The last beams of day were now faintly streaming through 
the painted windows in the high vaults above me; the lower 
parts of the abbey were already wrapped in the obscurity of 
twilight. The chapels and aisles grew darker and darker. The 
effigies of the kings faded into shadows; the marble figures of 
the monuments assumed strange shapes in the uncertain light; 
the evening breeze crept through the aisles like the cold breath 
of the grave ; and even the distant footfall of a verger, travers- 
ing the Poets' Corner, had something strange and dreary in its 
sound. I slowly retraced my morning's walk, and as I passed 
out at the portal of the cloisters, the door, closing with a jarring 
noise behind me, filled the whole building with echoes. 

I endeavored to form some arrangement in my mind of the 
objects I had been contemplating, but found they were already 
falling into indistinctness and confusion. Names, inscriptions, 
trophies, had all become confounded in my recollection, though 
I had scarcely taken my foot from off the threshold. What, 
thought I, is this vast assemblage of sepulchres but a treasury 
of humiliation; a huge pile of reiterated homilies on the empti- 
ness of renown and the certainty of oblivion! It is, indeed, the 
empire of Death; his great shadowy palace, where he sits in 
state, mocking at the relics of human glory, and spreading dust 
and forgetfulness on the monuments of princes. How idle a 
boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever 
silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by 
the story of the present, to think of the characters and anec- 
dotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume 
thrown aside to be speedily forgotten. The idol of to-day pushes 
the hero of yesterday out of our recollection; and will, in turn, 
be supplanted by his successor of to-morrow. "Our fathers," 
says Sir Thomas Browne, "find their graves in our short mem- 



66 WASHINGTON IRVING 

ories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors." 
History fades into fable ; fact becomes clouded with doubt and 
controversy; the inscription moulders from the tablet; the 
statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, 
what are they but heaps of sand ; and their epitaphs but char- 
acters written in the dust? What is the security of a tomb, or 
the perpetuity of an embalmment? The remains of Alexander 
the Great have been scattered to the wind, and his empty 
sarcophagus is now the mere curiosity of a museum. "The 
Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses 1 or time hath spared, 
avarice now consumeth; Mizraim 2 cures wounds, and Pharaoh 
is sold for balsams." 3 

What, then, is to insure this pile, which now towers above 
me, from sharing the fate of mightier mausoleums? The time 
must come when its gilded vaults, which now spring so loftily, 
shall lie in rubbish beneath the feet; when, instead of the sound 
of melody and praise, the wind shall whistle through the broken 
arches, and the owl hoot from the shattered tower; when the 
gairish 4 sunbeam shall break into these gloomy mansions of 
death, and the ivy twine round the fallen column, and the fox- 
glove hang its blossoms about the nameless urn, as if in mock- 
ery of the dead. Thus man passes away; his name perishes from 
record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and 
his very monument becomes a ruin. 

CHRISTMAS EVE 5 

Saint Francis and Saint Benedight 
Blesse this house from wicked wight; 
From the night-mare and the goblin, 
That is hight good fellow Robin; 
Keep it from all evil spirits, 
Fairies, weezels, rats, and ferrets: 

From curfew time, 

To the next prime. 

Cartweight. 

It was a brilliant moonlight night, but extremely cold; our 
chaise whirled rapidly over the frozen ground; the postboy 
smacked his whip incessantly, and a part of the time his horses 
were on a gallop. "He knows where he is going," said my com- 

1 Egypt was conquered by Cambyses III, King of Persia, in 525 B.C. 

2 An ancient name of Egypt, but here used for the earliest rulers taken col- 
lectively. 

3 Also quoted from Sir Thomas Browne. 4 Garish. 6 Sketch-Book. 



CHRISTMAS EVE 67 

panion, laughing, "and is eager to arrive in time for some of 
the merriment and good cheer of the servants' hall. My father, 
you must know, is a bigoted devotee of the old school, and 
prides himself upon keeping up something of old English hos- 
pitality. He is a tolerable specimen of what you will rarely 
meet with nowadays in its purity, the old English country 
gentleman; for our men of fortune spend so much of their time 
in town, and fashion is carried so much into the country, that 
the strong rich peculiarities of ancient rural life are almost pol- 
ished away. My father, however, from early years, took honest 
Peacham 1 for his text-book, instead of Chesterfield; 2 he deter- 
mined in his own mind, that there was no condition more truly 
honorable and enviable than that of a country gentleman on 
his paternal lands, and therefore passes the whole of his time 
on his estate. He is a strenuous advocate for the revival of the 
old rural games and holiday observances, and is deeply read 
in the writers, ancient and modern, who have treated on the 
subject. Indeed his favorite range of reading is among the 
authors who flourished at least two centuries since; who, he in- 
sists, wrote and thought more like true Englishmen than any 
of their successors. He even regrets sometimes that he had not 
been born a few centuries earlier, when England was itself, and 
had its peculiar manners and customs. As he lives at some 
distance from the main road, in rather a lonely part of the 
country, without any rival gentry near him, he has that most 
enviable of all blessings to an Englishman, an opportunity 
of indulging the bent of his own humor without molestation. 
Being representative of the oldest family in the neighborhood, 
and a great part of the peasantry being his tenants, he is much 
looked up to, and, in general, is known simply by the appella- 
tion of ' The Squire ' ; a title which has been accorded to the head 
of the family since time immemorial. I think it best to give you 
these hints about my worthy old father, to prepare you for any 
eccentricities that might otherwise appear absurd." 

We had passed for some time along the wall of a park, and at 
length the chaise stopped at the gate. It was in a heavy mag- 
nificent old style, of iron bars, fancifully wrought at top into 
flourishes and flowers. The huge square columns that supported 

1 Peacham's The Complete Gentleman, 1622. 

2 The Earl of Chesterfield's well-known Letters to his son, 1774. 



68 WASHINGTON IRVING 

the gate were surmounted by the family crest. Close adjoining 
was the porter's lodge, sheltered under dark fir-trees, and almost 
buried in shrubbery. 

The postboy rang a large porter's bell, which resounded 
through the still frosty air, and was answered by the distant 
barking of dogs, with which the mansion-house seemed garri- 
soned. An old woman immediately appeared at the gate. As 
the moonlight fell strongly upon her, I had a full view of a 
little primitive dame, dressed very much in the antique taste, 
with a neat kerchief and stomacher, and her silver hair peeping 
from under a cap of snowy whiteness. She came courtesying 
forth, with many expressions of simple joy at seeing her young 
master. Her husband, it seemed, was up at the house keeping 
Christmas eve in the servants' hall; they could not do without 
him, as he was the best hand at a song and story in the house- 
hold. 

My friend proposed that we should alight and walk through 
the park to the hall, which was at no great distance, while the 
chaise should follow on. Our road wound through a noble ave- 
nue of trees, among the naked branches of which the moon 
glittered, as she rolled through the deep vault of a cloudless 
sky. The lawn beyond was sheeted with a slight covering of 
snow, which here and there sparkled as the moonbeams caught 
a frosty crystal; and at a distance might be seen a thin trans- 
parent vapor, stealing up from the low grounds and threatening 
gradually to shroud the landscape. 

My companion looked around him with transport. "How 
often," said he, "have I scampered up this avenue, on return- 
ing home on school vacations ! How often have I played under 
these trees when a boy! I feel a degree of filial reverence for 
them, as we look up to those who have cherished us in child- 
hood. My father was always scrupulous in exacting our holi- 
days, and having us around him on family festivals. He used 
to direct and superintend our games with the strictness that 
some parents do the studies of their children. He was very 
particular that we should play the old English games according 
to their original form; and consulted old books for precedent 
and authority for every 'merrie disport'; yet I assure you 
there never was pedantry so delightful. It was the policy of the 
good old gentleman to make his children feel that home was the 



CHRISTMAS EVE 69 

happiest place in the world; and I value this delicious home- 
feeling as one of the choicest gifts a parent could bestow." 

We were interrupted by the clamor of a troop of dogs of all 
sorts and sizes, "mongrel, puppy, whelp and hound, and curs 
of low degree," that, disturbed by the ring of the porter's bell 
and the rattling of the chaise, came bounding, open-mouthed, 
across the lawn. 

"— The little dogs and all, 
Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me!" 

cried Bracebridge, laughing. At the sound of his voice, the 
bark was changed into a yelp of delight, and in a moment he 
was surrounded and almost overpowered by the caresses of the 
faithful animals. 

We had now come in full view of the old family mansion, 
partly thrown in deep shadow, and partly lit up by the cold 
moonshine. It was an irregular building, of some magnitude, 
and seemed to be of the architecture of different periods. One 
wing was evidently very ancient, with heavy stone-shafted 
bow windows jutting out and overrun with ivy, from among 
the foliage of which the small diamond-shaped panes of glass 
glittered with the moonbeams. The rest of the house was in 
the French taste of Charles the Second's time, having been re- 
paired and altered, as my friend told me, by one of his ances- 
tors, who returned with that monarch at the Restoration. The 
grounds about the house were laid out in the old formal manner 
of artificial flower-beds, clipped shrubberies, raised terraces, 
and heavy stone balustrades, ornamented with urns, a leaden 
statue or two, and a jet of water. The old gentleman, I was 
told, was extremely careful to preserve this obsolete finery in 
all its original state. He admired this fashion in gardening; it 
had an air of magnificence, was courtly and noble, and befitting 
good old family style. The boasted imitation of nature in mod- 
ern gardening had sprung up with modern republican notions, 
but did not suit a monarchical government; it smacked of the 
levelling system — I could not help smiling at this introduction 
of politics into gardening, though I expressed some apprehen- 
sion that I should find the old gentleman rather intolerant in 
his creed. — Frank assured me, however, that it was almost the 
only instance in which he had ever heard his father meddle with 



70 WASHINGTON IRVING 

politics; and he believed that he had got this notion from , a 
member of parliament who once passed a few weeks with him. 
The squire was glad of any argument to defend his clipped yew- 
trees and formal terraces, which had been occasionally attacked 
by modern landscape gardeners. 

As we approached the house, we heard the sound of music, 
and now and then a burst of laughter, from one end of the 
building. This, Bracebridge said, must proceed from the serv- 
ants' hall, where a great deal of revelry was permitted, and 
even encouraged by the squire, throughout the twelve days of 
Christmas, provided everything was done conformably to an- 
cient usage. Here were kept up the old games of hoodman 
blind, shoe the wild mare, hot cockles, steal the white loaf, bob 
apple, and snap dragon: the Yule log and Christmas candle 
were regularly burnt, and the mistletoe, with its white berries, 
hung up, to the imminent peril of all the pretty housemaids. 1 

So intent were the servants upon their sports that we had 
to ring repeatedly before we could make ourselves heard. On 
our arrival being announced, the squire came out to receive us, 
accompanied by his two other sons ; one a young officer in the 
army, home on leave of absence; the other an Oxonian, just 
from the university. The squire was a fine healthy-looking old 
gentleman, with silver hair curling lightly round an open florid 
countenance; in which the physiognomist, with the advantage, 
like myself, of a previous hint or two, might discover a singular 
mixture of whim and benevolence. 

The family meeting was warm and affectionate; as the eve- 
ning was far advanced, the squire would not permit us to change 
our travelling dress, but ushered us at once to the company, 
which was assembled in a large old-fashioned hall. It was com- 
posed of different branches of a numerous family connection, 
where there were the usual proportion of old uncles and aunts, 
comfortable married dames, superannuated spinsters, bloom- 
ing country cousins, half-fledged striplings, and bright-eyed 
boarding-school hoydens. They were variously occupied; some 
at a round game of cards; 2 others conversing around the fire- 

1 The mistletoe is still hung up in farmhouses and kitchens at Christmas; and 
the young men have the privilege of kissing the girls under it, plucking each time 
a berry from the bush. When the berries are all plucked, the privilege ceases. 
[Author's note.] 

2 Each playing without a partner. 



CHRISTMAS EVE 71 

place; at one end of the hall was a group of the young folks, 
some nearly grown up, others of a more tender and budding 
age, fully engrossed by a merry game; and a profusion of wooden 
horses, penny trumpets, and tattered dolls, about the floor, 
showed traces of a troop of little fairy beings, who, having 
frolicked through a happy day, had been carried off to slumber 
through a peaceful night. 

While the mutual greetings were going on between young 
Bracebridge and his relatives, I had time to scan the apart- 
ment. I have called it a hall, for so it had certainly been in old 
times, and the squire had evidently endeavored to restore it to 
something of its primitive state. Over the heavy projecting 
fireplace was suspended a picture of a warrior in armor, stand- 
ing by a white horse, and on the opposite wall hung a helmet, 
buckler, and lance. At one end an enormous pair of antlers 
were inserted in the wall, the branches serving as hooks on 
which to suspend hats, whips, and spurs; and in the corners of 
the apartment were fowling-pieces, fishing-rods, and other 
sporting implements. The furniture was of the cumbrous work- 
manship of former days, though some articles of modern con- 
venience had been added, and the oaken floor had been car- 
peted; so that the whole presented an odd mixture of parlor 
and hall. 

The grate had been removed from the wide overwhelming 1 
fireplace, to make way for a fire of wood, in the midst of which 
was an enormous log glowing and blazing, and sending forth 
a vast volume of light and heat: this I understood was the 
Yule clog, which the squire was particular in having brought 
in and illumined on a Christmas eve, according to ancient 
custom. 2 

1 Overhanging. 

2 The Yule clog is a great log of wood, sometimes the root of a tree, brought 
into the house with great ceremony, on Christmas eve, laid in the fireplace, and 
lighted with the brand of last year's clog. While it lasted, there was great drink- 
ing, singing, and telling of tales. Sometimes it was accompanied by Christmas 
candles; but in the cottages the only light was from the ruddy blaze of the great 
wood fire. The Yule clog was to burn all night; if it went out, it was considered 
a sign of ill luck. 

Herrick mentions it in one of his songs: — 

"Come, bring with a noise, 
My merrie, merrie boyes, 
The Christmas log to the firing; 
While my good dame, she 



72 WASHINGTON IRVING 

It was really delightful to see the old squire seated in his 
hereditary elbow chair, by the hospitable fireside of his ances- 
tors, and looking around him like the sun of a system, beaming 
warmth and gladness to every heart. Even the very dog that 
lay stretched at his feet, as he lazily shifted his position and 
yawned, would look fondly up in his master's face, wag his tail 
against the floor, and stretch himself again to sleep, confident of 
kindness and protection. There is an emanation from the heart 
in genuine hospitality which cannot be described, but is imme- 
diately felt, and puts the stranger at once at his ease. I had not 
been seated many minutes by the comfortable hearth of the 
worthy old cavalier, before I found myself as much at home as 
if I had been one of the family. 

Supper was announced shortly after our arrival. It was 
served up in a spacious oaken chamber, the panels of which 
shone with wax, and around which were several family portraits 
decorated with holly and ivy. Besides the accustomed lights, 
two great wax tapers, called Christmas candles, wreathed with 
greens, were placed on a highly polished beaufet among the 
family plate. The table was abundantly spread with substan- 
tial fare; but the squire made his supper of frumenty, a dish 
made of wheat cakes boiled in milk, with rich spices, being a 
standing dish in old times for Christmas eve. 

I was happy to find my old friend, minced pie, in the retinue 
of the feast; and finding him to be perfectly orthodox, and that 
I need not be ashamed of my predilection, I greeted him with 
all the warmth wherewith we usually greet an old and very 
genteel acquaintance. 

The mirth of the company was greatly promoted by the 
humors of an eccentric personage whom Mr. Bracebridge al- 
ways addressed with the quaint appellation of Master Simon. 
He was a tight, 1 brisk little man, with the air of an arrant old 

Bids ye all be free, 
And drink to your heart's desiring." 

The Yule clog is still burnt in many farmhouses and kitchens in England, par- 
ticularly in the north, and there are several superstitions connected with it among 
the peasantry. If a squinting person come to the house while it is burning, or a 
person barefooted, it is considered an ill omen. The brand remaining from the 
Yule clog is carefully put away to light the next year's Christmas fire. [Author's 
note.] 

1 Tidy [archaic]. 



CHRISTMAS EVE 73 

bachelor. His nose was shaped like the bill of a parrot ; his face 
slightly pitted with the small-pox, with a dry perpetual bloom 
on it, like a frostbitten leaf in autumn. He had an eye of great 
quickness and vivacity, with a drollery and lurking waggery 
of expression that was irresistible. He was evidently the wit of 
the family, dealing very much in sly jokes and inuendoes with 
the ladies, and making infinite merriment by harping upon old 
themes; which, unfortunately, my ignorance of the family 
chronicles did not permit me to enjoy. It seemed to be his 
great delight during supper to keep a young girl next him in a 
continual agony of stifled laughter, in spite of her awe of the 
reproving looks of her mother, who sat opposite. Indeed, he 
was the idol of the younger part of the company, who laughed 
at everything he said or did, and at every turn of his counte- 
nance ; I could not wonder at it, for he must have been a mira- 
cle of accomplishments in their eyes. He could imitate Punch 
and Judy; make an old woman of his hand, with the assistance 
of a burnt cork and pocket-handkerchief; and cut an orange 
into such a ludicrous caricature, that the young folks were 
ready to die with laughing. 

I was let briefly into his history by Frank Bracebridge. He 
was an old bachelor, of a small independent income, which, by 
careful management, was sufficient for all his wants. He re- 
volved through the family system like a vagrant comet in its 
orbit; sometimes visiting one branch, and sometimes another 
quite remote; as is often the case with gentlemen of extensive 
connections and small fortunes in England. He had a chirping, 
buoyant disposition, always enjoying the present moment; 
and his frequent change of scene and company prevented his 
acquiring those rusty unaccommodating habits, with which 
old bachelors are so uncharitably charged. He was a complete 
family chronicle, being versed in the genealogy, history, and 
intermarriages of the whole house of Bracebridge, which made 
him a great favorite with the old folks; he was a beau of all the 
elder ladies and superannuated spinsters, among whom he was 
habitually considered rather a young fellow, and he was master 
of the revels among the children ; so that there was not a more 
popular being in the sphere in which he moved than Mr. Simon 
Bracebridge. Of late years, he had resided almost entirely with 
the squire, to whom he had become a factotum, and whom he 



74 WASHINGTON IRVING 

particularly delighted by jumping with his humor in respect to 
old times, and by having a scrap of an old song to suit every 
occasion. We had presently a specimen of his last-mentioned 
talent, for no sooner was supper removed, and spiced wines 
and other beverages peculiar to the season introduced, than 
Master Simon was called on for a good old Christmas song. He 
bethought himself for a moment, and then, with a sparkle of 
the eye, and a voice that was by no means bad, excepting that 
it ran occasionally into a falsetto, like the notes of a split reed, 1 
he quavered forth a quaint old ditty. 

"Now Christmas is come, 

Let us beat up the drum, 
And call all our neighbors together, 

And when they appear, 

Let us make them such cheer, 
As will keep out the wind and the weather," etc. 

The supper had disposed every one to gayety, and an old 
harper was summoned from the servants' hall, where he had 
been strumming all the evening, and to all appearance comfort- 
ing himself with some of the squire's home-brewed. He was a 
kind of hanger-on, I was told, of the establishment, and, though 
ostensibly a resident of the village, was oftener to be found in 
the squire's kitchen than his own home, the old gentleman 
being fond of the sound of "harp in hall." 

The dance, like most dances after supper, was a merry one; 
some of the older folks joined in it, and the squire himself fig- 
ured down several couple with a partner, with whom he 
affirmed he had danced at every Christmas for nearly half a 
century. Master Simon, who seemed to be a kind of connecting 
link between the old times and the new, and to be withal a little 
antiquated in the taste of his accomplishments, evidently 
piqued himself on his dancing, and was endeavoring to gain 
credit by the heel and toe, rigadoon, and other graces of the 
ancient school; but he had unluckily assorted himself with a 
little romping girl from boarding-school, who, by her wild 
vivacity, kept him continually on the stretch, and defeated all 
his sober attempts at elegance: — such are the ill-assorted 
matches to which antique gentlemen are unfortunately prone ! 

The young Oxonian, on the contrary, had led out one of his 
1 A kind of pipe used in a pipe-organ. 



CHRISTMAS EVE 75 

maiden aunts, on whom the rogue played a thousand little 
knaveries with impunity: he was full of practical jokes, and his 
delight was to tease his aunts and cousins; yet, like all madcap 
youngsters, he was a universal favorite among the women. 
The most interesting couple in the dance was the young officer 
and a ward of the squire's, a beautiful blushing girl of seven- 
teen. From several shy glances which I had noticed in the 
course of the evening, I suspected there was a little kindness 
growing up between them; and, indeed, the young soldier was 
just the hero to captivate a romantic girl. He was tall, slender, 
and handsome, and, like most young British officers of late 
years, had picked up various small accomplishments on the 
continent; he could talk French and Italian, draw landscapes, 
sing very tolerably, dance divinely; but, above all, he had been 
wounded at Waterloo: — what girl of seventeen, well read in 
poetry and romance, could resist such a mirror of chivalry and 
perfection ! 

The moment the dance was over, he caught up a guitar, and, 
lolling against the old marble fireplace, in an attitude which I 
am half inclined to suspect was studied, began the little French 
air of the Troubadour. The squire, however, exclaimed against 
having anything on Christmas eve but good old English ; upon 
which the young minstrel, casting up his eye for a moment, as 
if in an effort of memory, struck into another strain, and, with 
a charming air of gallantry, gave Herrick's "Night-piece to 
Julia." 

"Her eyes the glow-worm lend thee, 
The shooting stars attend thee, 

And the elves also, 

Whose little eyes glow 
Like the sparks of fire, befriend thee. 

"No Will o' the Wisp mislight thee; 
Nor snake nor slow- worm bite thee; 

But on, on thy way, 

Not making a stay, 
Since ghost there is none to affright thee. 

"Then let not the dark thee cumber; 
What though the moon does slumber, 
The stars of the night 
Will lend thee their light, 
Like tapers clear without number. 



76 WASHINGTON IRVING 

"Then, Julia, let me woo thee, 
Thus, thus to come unto me, 
And when I shall meet 
Thy silvery feet, 
My soul I'll pour into thee." 

The song might or might not have been intended in compli- 
ment to the fair Julia, for so I found his partner was called; she, 
however, was certainly unconscious of any such application, 
for she never looked at the singer, but kept her eyes cast upon 
the floor. Her face was suffused, it is true, with a beautiful 
blush, and there was a gentle heaving of the bosom, but all that 
was doubtless caused by the exercise of the dance; indeed, so 
great was her indifference, that she amused herself with pluck- 
ing to pieces a choice bouquet of hot-house flowers, and by the 
time the song was concluded the nosegay lay in ruins on the 
floor. 

The party now broke up for the night with the kind-hearted 
old custom of shaking hands. As I passed through the hall, on 
my way to my chamber, the dying embers of the Yule clog still 
sent forth a dusky glow, and had it not been the season when 
"no spirit dares stir abroad," I should have been half tempted 
to steal from my room at midnight, and peep whether the 
fairies might not be at their revels about the hearth. 

My chamber was in the old part of the mansion, the ponder^ 
ous furniture of which might have been fabricated in the days 
of the giants. The room was panelled with cornices of heavy 
carved work, in which flowers and grotesque faces were 
strangely intermingled; and a row of black-looking portraits 
stared mournfully at me from the walls. The bed was of rich, 
though faded damask, with a lofty tester, and stood in a niche 
opposite a bow window. I had scarcely got into bed when a 
strain of music seemed to break forth in the air just below the 
window. I listened, and found it proceeded from a band, which 
I concluded to be the Waits from some neighboring village. 
They went round the house, playing under the windows. I 
drew aside the curtains to hear them more distinctly. The 
moonbeams fell through the upper part of the casement, par- 
tially lighting up the antiquated apartment. The sounds, as 
they receded, became more soft and aerial, and seemed to 
accord with the quiet and moonlight. I listened and listened — 



RIP VAN WINKLE 77 

they became more and more tender and remote, and, as they 
gradually died away, my head sank upon the pillow, and I fell 
asleep. 

RIP VAN WINKLE 1 

A POSTHUMOUS WRITING OF DIEDRICH KNICKERBOCKER 2 

By Woden, God of Saxons, 

From whence comes Wensday, that is Wodensday. 

Truth is a thing that ever I will keep 

Unto thylke day in which I creep into 

My sepulchre. Cartwright. 

The following tale was found among the papers of the late Diedrich 
Knickerbocker, an old gentleman of New York, who was very curious in 
the Dutch history of the province, and the manners of the descendants 
from its primitive settlers. His historical researches, however, did not 
lie so much among books as among men; for the former are lamentably 
scanty on his favorite topics; whereas he found the old burghers, and still 
more their wives, rich in that legendary lore so invaluable to true his- 
tory. Whenever, therefore, he happened upon a genuine Dutch family, 
snugly shut up in its low-roofed farmhouse under a spreading sycamore, 
he looked upon it as a little clasped volume of black-letter, and studied 
it with the zeal of a book-worm. 

The result of all these researches was a history of the province during 
the reign of the Dutch governors, which he published some years since. 
There have been various opinions as to the literary character of his work, 
and, to tell the truth, it is not a whit better than it should be. Its chief 
merit is its scrupulous accuracy, which indeed was a little questioned on 
its first appearance, but has since been completely established; and it is 
now admitted into all historical collections, as a book of unquestionable 
authority. 

The old gentleman died shortly after the publication of his work, and 
now that he is dead and gone, it cannot do much harm to his memory 
to say that his time might have been much better employed in weightier 
labors. 3 He, however, was apt to ride his hobby his own way; and though 
it did now and then kick up the dust a little in the eyes of his neighbors, 
and grieve the spirit of some friends, for whom he felt the truest defer- 
ence and affection; yet his errors and follies are remembered "more in 
sorrow than in anger," and it begins to be suspected that he never in- 
tended to injure or offend. But however his memory may be appreciated 

1 Skctch-Book. 2 See p. 38, note. 

3 Among the critics of the History of New York was a close friend of Irving, 
Gulian C. Verplanck, who, in a discourse before the New York Historical Society, 
said: "It is painful to see a mind, as admirable for its exquisite perception of the 
beautiful as it is for its quick sense of the ridiculous, wasting the richness of its 
fancy on an ungrateful theme, and its exuberant humor in a coarse caricature." 
Irving has alluded to this stricture with characteristic good-humor. 



78 WASHINGTON IRVING 

by critics, it is still held dear by many folk, whose good opinion is worth 
having; particularly by certain biscuit-bakers, who have gone so far as 
to imprint his likeness on their new-year cakes; and have thus given him 
a chance for immortality, almost equal to the being stamped on a Water- 
loo Medal, or a Queen Anne's Farthing. 1 

Whoever has made a voyage up the Hudson must remem- 
ber the Kaatskill Mountains. They are a dismembered branch 
of the great Appalachian family, and are seen away to the west 
of the river, swelling up to a noble height, and lording it over 
the surrounding country. Every change of season, every change 
of weather, indeed, every hour of the day, produces some 
change in the magical hues and shapes of these mountains, and 
they are regarded by all the good wives, far and near, as perfect 
barometers. When the weather is fair and settled, they are 
clothed in blue and purple, and print their bold outlines on the 
clear evening sky; but sometimes when the rest of the land- 
scape is cloudless they will gather a hood of gray vapors about 
their summits, which, in the last rays of the setting sun, will 
glow and light up like a crown of glory. 

At the foot of these fairy mountains, the voyager may have 
descried the light smoke curling up from a village, whose 
shingle-roofs gleam among the trees, just where the blue tints/of 
the upland melt away into the fresh green of the nearer J^nd- 
scape. It is a little village of great antiquity, having been 
founded by some of the Dutch colonists in the early time of the 
province, just about the beginning of the government of the 
good Peter Stuyvesant (may he rest in peace!), and there were 
some of the houses of the original settlers standing within a 
few years, built of small yellow bricks brought from Holland, 
having latticed windows and gable fronts, surmounted with 
weathercocks. 

In that same village, and in one of these very houses (which, 
to tell the precise truth, was sadly time-worn and weather- 
beaten), there lived many years since, while the country was 
yet a province of Great Britain, a simple, good-natured fellow, 
of the name of Rip Van Winkle. He was a descendant of the 
Van Winkles who figured so gallantly in the chivalrous days of 
Peter Stuyvesant, and accompanied him to the siege of Fort 

1 According to a popular delusion, only three farthings were struck in Queen 
Anne's reign. 



RIP VAN WINKLE 79 

Christina. 1 He inherited, however, but little of the martial 
character of his ancestors. I have observed that he was a 
simple, good-natured man; he was, moreover, a kind neighbor, 
and an obedient henpecked husband. Indeed, to the latter 
circumstance might be owing that meekness of spirit which 
gained him such universal popularity; for those men are most 
apt to be obsequious and conciliating abroad, who are under 
the discipline of shrews at home. Their tempers, doubtless, 
are rendered pliant and malleable in the fiery furnace of domes- 
tic tribulation; and a curtain lecture is worth all the sermons in 
the world for teaching the virtues of patience and long-suffering. 
A termagant wife may, therefore, in some respects be consid- 
ered a tolerable blessing, and if so, Rip Van Winkle was thrice 
blessed. 

Certain it is, that he was a great favorite among all the good 
wives of the village, who, as usual with the amiable sex, took 
his part in all family squabbles; and never failed, whenever 
they talked those matters over in their evening gossipings, to 
lay all the blame on Dame Van Winkle. The children of the 
village, too, would shout with joy whenever he approached. 
He assisted at their sports, made their playthings, taught them 
to fly kites and shoot marbles, and told them long stories of 
ghosts, witches, and Indians. Whenever he went dodging 
about the village, he was surrounded by a troop of them, hang- 
ing on his skirts, clambering on his back, and playing a thou- 
sand tricks on him with impunity; and not a dog would bark at 
him throughout the neighborhood. 

The great error in Rip's composition was an insuperable 
aversion to all kinds of profitable labor. It could not be from 
the want of assiduity or perseverance; for he would sit on a 
wet rock, with a rod as long and heavy as a Tartar's lance, and 
fish all day without a murmur, even though he should not be 
encouraged by a single nibble. He would carry a fowling-piece 
on his shoulder for hours together, trudging through woods and 
swamps, and up hill and down dale, to shoot a few squirrels or 
wild pigeons. He would never refuse to assist a neighbor, even 
in the roughest toil, and was a foremost man at all country 
frolics for husking Indian corn, or building stone-fences; the 
women of the village, too, used to employ him to run their 
1 History of New York, book vi, chap. vni. 



80 WASHINGTON IRVING 

errands, and to do such little odd jobs as their less obliging 
husbands would not do for them. In a word, Rip was ready to 
attend to anybody's business but his own; but as to doing 
family duty, and keeping his farm in order, he found it im- 
possible. 

In fact, he declared it was of no use to work on his farm; it 
was the most pestilent little piece of ground in the whole coun- 
try; everything about it went wrong, and would go wrong, in 
spite of him. His fences were continually falling to pieces; his 
cow would either go astray or get among the cabbages; weeds 
were sure to grow quicker in his fields than anywhere else ; the 
rain always made a point of setting in just as he had some out- 
door work to do; so that though his patrimonial estate had 
dwindled away under his management, acre by acre, until there 
was little more left than a mere patch of Indian corn and pota- 
toes, yet it was the worst-conditioned farm in the neighborhood. 

His children, too, were as ragged and wild as if they belonged 
to nobody. His son Rip, an urchin begotten in his own likeness, 
promised to inherit the habits, with the old clothes of his father. 
He was generally seen trooping like a colt at his mother's heels, 
equipped in a pair of his father's cast-off galligaskins, which he 
had much ado to hold up with one hand, as a fine lady does her 
train in bad weather. 

Rip Van Winkle, however, was one of those happy mortals, 
of foolish, well-oiled dispositions, who take the world easy, eat 
white bread or brown, whichever can be got with least thought 
or trouble, and would rather starve on a penny than work for a 
pound. If left to himself, he would have whistled life away in 
perfect contentment; but his wife kept continually dinning in 
his ears about his idleness, his carelessness, and the ruin he was 
bringing on his family. Morning, noon, and night her tongue 
was incessantly going, and everything he said or did was sure 
to produce a torrent of household eloquence. Rip had but one 
way of replying to all lectures of the kind, and that, by frequent 
use, had grown into a habit. He shrugged his shoulders, shook 
his head, cast up his eyes, but said nothing. This, however, 
always provoked a fresh volley from his wife; so that he was 
fain to draw off his forces, and take to the outside of the house 
— the only side which, in truth, belongs to a henpecked hus- 
band. 



RIP VAN WINKLE 81 

Rip's sole domestic adherent was his dog, Wolf, who was as 
much henpecked as his master; for Dame Van Winkle regarded 
them as companions in idleness, and even looked upon Wolf 
with an evil eye, as the cause of his master's going so often 
astray. True it is, in all points of spirit befitting an honorable 
dog, he was as courageous an animal as ever scoured the woods 
— but what courage can withstand the ever-during and all- 
besetting terrors of a woman's tongue? The moment Wolf 
entered the house his crest fell, his tail drooped to the ground, 
or curled between his legs, he sneaked about with a gallows air, 
casting many a side-long glance at Dame Van Winkle, and at 
the least flourish of a broomstick or ladle he would fly to the 
door with yelping precipitation. 

Times grew worse and worse with Rip Van Winkle. as years 
of matrimony rolled on; a tart temper never mellows with age, 
and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener 
with constant use. For a long while he used to console him- 
self, when driven from home, by frequenting a kind of perpetual 
club of the sages, philosophers, and other idle personages of 
the village; which held its sessions on a bench before a small 
inn, designated by a rubicund portrait of His Majesty George 
the Third. Here they used to sit in the shade through a long 
lazy summer's day, talking listlessly over village gossip, or 
telling endless sleepy stories about nothing. But it would have 
been worth any statesman's money to have heard the profound 
discussions that sometimes took place, when by chance an old 
newspaper fell into their hands from some passing traveller. 
How solemnly they would listen to the contents, as drawled 
out by Derrick Van Bummel, the school-master, a dapper 
learned little man, who was not to be daunted by the most 
gigantic word in the dictionary; and how sagely they would 
deliberate upon public events some months after they had taken 
place. 

The opinions of this junto were completely controlled by 
Nicholas Vedder, a patriarch of the village, and landlord of the 
inn, at the door of which he took his seat from morning till 
night, just moving sufficiently to avoid the sun and keep in the 
shade of a large tree; so that the neighbors could tell the hour 
by his movements as accurately as by a sun-dial. It is true he 
was rarely heard to speak, but smoked his pipe incessantly. 



82 WASHINGTON IRVING 

His adherents, however (for every great man has his adher- 
ents), perfectly understood him, and knew how to gather his 
opinions. When anything that was read or related displeased 
him, he was observed to smoke his pipe vehemently, and to 
send forth short, frequent, and angry puffs; but when pleased, 
he would inhale the smoke slowly and tranquilly, and emit it in 
light and placid clouds; and sometimes, taking the pipe from 
his mouth, and letting the fragrant vapor curl about his nose, 
would gravely nod his head in token of perfect approbation. 

From even this stronghold the unlucky Rip was at length 
routed by his termagant wife, who would suddenly break in 
upon the tranquillity of the assemblage and call the members 
all to nought; nor was that august personage, Nicholas Vedder 
himself, sacred from the daring tongue of this terrible virago, 
who charged him outright with encouraging her husband in 
habits of idleness. 

Poor Rip was at last reduced almost to despair; and his only 
alternative, to escape from the labor of the farm and clamor 
of his wife, was to take gun in hand and stroll away into the 
woods. Here he would sometimes seat himself at the foot of a 
tree, and share the contents of his wallet with Wolf ,/with whom 
he sympathized as a fellow-sufferer in persecution. "Poor 
Wolf," he would say, "thy mistress leads thee a dog's life of it; 
but never mind, my lad, whilst I live thou shalt never want a 
friend to stand by thee!" Wolf would wag his tail, look wist- 
fully in his master's face, and if dogs can feel pity I verily 
believe he reciprocated the sentiment with all his heart. 

In a long ramble of the kind on a fine autumnal day, Rip 
had unconsciously scrambled to one of the highest parts of the 
Kaatskill Mountains. He was after his favorite sport of squirrel 
shooting, and the still solitudes had echoed and reechoed with 
the reports of his gun. Panting and fatigued, he threw himself, 
late in the afternoon, on a green knoll, covered with mountain 
herbage, that, crowned the brow of a precipice. From an open- 
ing between the trees he could overlook all the lower country 
for many a mile of rich woodland. He saw at a distance the 
lordly Hudson, far, far below him, moving on its silent but 
majestic course, with the reflection of a purple cloud, or the 
sail of a lagging bark, here and there sleeping on its glassy 
bosom, and at last losing itself in the blue highlands. 



RIP VAN WINKLE 83 

On the other side he looked down into a deep mountain glen, 
wild, lonely, and shagged, the bottom filled with fragments 
from the impending cliffs, and scarcely lighted by the reflected 
rays of the setting sun. For some time Rip lay musing on this 
scene; evening was gradually advancing; the mountains began 
to throw their long blue shadows over the valleys; he saw that 
it would be dark long before he could reach the village, and he 
heaved a heavy sigh when he thought of encountering the 
terrors of Dame Van Winkle. 

As he was about to descend, he heard a voice from a distance, 
hallooing, "Rip Van Winkle! Rip Van Winkle!" He looked 
round, but could see nothing but a crow winging its solitary 
flight across the mountain. He thought his fancy must have 
deceived him, and turned again to descend, when he heard the 
same cry ring through the still evening air: "Rip Van Winkle! 
Rip Van Winkle!" — at the same time Wolf bristled up his 
back, and giving a low growl, skulked to his master's side, 
looking fearfully down into the glen. Rip now felt a vague 
apprehension stealing over him; he looked anxiously in the 
same direction, and perceived a strange figure slowly toiling 
up the rocks, and bending under the weight of something he 
carried on his back. He was surprised to see any human being 
in this lonely and unfrequented place; but supposing it to be 
some one of the neighborhood in need of his assistance, he 
hastened down to yield it. 

On nearer approach he was still more surprised at the singu- 
larity of the stranger's appearance. He was a short, square- 
built old fellow, with thick bushy hair, and a grizzled beard. 
His dress was of the antique Dutch fashion: a cloth jerkin 
strapped round the waist, several pair of breeches, the outer 
one of ample volume, decorated with rows of buttons down the 
sides, and bunches at the knees. He bore on his shoulder a 
stout keg, that seemed full of liquor, and made signs for Rip 
to approach and assist him with the load. Though rather shy 
and distrustful of this new acquaintance, Rip complied with 
his usual alacrity; and mutually relieving one another, they 
clambered up a narrow gully, apparently the dry bed of a 
mountain torrent. As they ascended, Rip every now and then 
heard long rolling peals like distant thunder, that seemed to 
issue out of a deep ravine, or rather cleft, between lofty rocks, 



84 WASHINGTON IRVING 

toward which their rugged path conducted. He paused for a 
moment, but supposing it to be the muttering of one of those 
transient thunder-showers which often take place in mountain 
heights, he proceeded. Passing through the ravine, they came 
to a hollow, like a small amphitheatre, surrounded by perpen- 
dicular precipices, over the brinks of which impending trees 
shot their branches, so that you only caught glimpses of the 
azure sky and the bright evening cloud. During the whole 
time Rip and his companion had labored on in silence; for 
though the former marvelled greatly what could be the object 
of carrying a keg of liquor up this wild mountain, yet there was 
something strange and incomprehensible about the unknown, 
that inspired awe and checked familiarity. 

On entering the amphitheatre, new objects of wonder pre- 
sented themselves. On. a level spot in the centre was a com- 
pany of odd-looking personages playing at ninepins. They 
were dressed in a quaint outlandish fashion; some wore short 
doublets, others jerkins, with long knives in their belts, and 
most of them had enormous breeches of simikr style with that 
of the guide's. Their visages, too, were peculiar; one had a large 
beard, broad face, and small piggish eyes; the face of another 
seemed to consist entirely of nose, and was surmounted by a 
white sugar-loaf hat, set off with a little red cock's tail. They 
all had beards, of various shapes and colors. There was one 
who seemed to be the commander. He was a stout old gentle- 
man, with a weather-beaten countenance; he wore a laced 
doublet, broad belt and hanger, high-crowned hat and feather, 
red stockings, and high-heeled shoes, with roses in them. The 
whole group reminded Rip of the figures in an old Flemish 
painting in the parlor of Dominie Van Shaick, the village par- 
son, which had been brought over from Holland at the time of 
the settlement. 

What seemed particularly odd to Rip was, that though these 
folks were evidently amusing themselves, yet they maintained 
the gravest faces, the most mysterious silence, and were, withal, 
the most melancholy party of pleasure he had ever witnessed. 
Nothing interrupted the stillness of the scene but the noise of 
the balls, which, whenever they were rolled, echoed along the 
mountains like rumbling peals of thunder. 

As Rip and his companion approached them, they suddenly 



RIP VAN WINKLE 85 

desisted from their play, and stared at him with such fixed, 
statue-like gaze, and such strange, uncouth, lack-lustre coun- 
tenances, that his heart turned within him, and his knees smote 
together. His companion now emptied the contents of the keg 
into large flagons, and made signs to him to wait upon the 
company. He obeyed with fear and trembling; they quaffed 
the liquor in profound silence, and then returned to their game. 

By degrees Rip's awe and apprehension subsided. He even 
ventured, when no eye was fixed upon him, to taste the bever- 
age, which he found had much of the flavor of excellent Hol- 
lands. He was naturally a thirsty soul, and was soon tempted 
to repeat the draught. One taste provoked another; and he 
reiterated his visits to the flagon so often that at length his 
senses were overpowered, his eyes swam in his head, his head 
gradually declined, and he fell into a deep sleep. 

On waking, he found himself on the green knoll whence he 
had first seen the old man of the glen. He rubbed his eyes — 
it was a bright, sunny morning. The birds were hopping and 
twittering among the bushes, and the eagle was wheeling aloft, 
and breasting the pure mountain breeze. "Surely," thought 
Rip, "I have not slept here all night." He recalled the occur- 
rences before he fell asleep. The strange man with a keg of 
liquor — the mountain ravine — the wild retreat among the 
rocks — the woe-begone party at ninepins — the flagon — 
"Oh! that flagon! that wicked flagon!" thought Rip — "what 
excuse shall I make to Dame Van Winkle?" 

He looked round for his gun, but in place of the clean, well- 
oiled fowling-piece, he found an old fire-lock lying by him, the 
barrel incrusted with rust, the lock falling off, and the stock 
worm-eaten. He now suspected that the grave roisters of the 
mountain had put a trick upon him, and, having dosed him 
with liquor, had robbed him of his gun. Wolf, too, had disap- 
peared, but he might have strayed away after a squirrel or 
partridge. He whistled after him, and shouted his name, but 
all in vain; the echoes repeated his whistle and shout, but no 
dog was to be seen. 

He determined to revisit the scene of the last evening's gam- 
bol, and if he met with any of the party, to demand his dog and 
gun. As he rose to walk, he found himself stiff in the joints, and 
wanting in his usual activity. "These mountain beds do not 



86 WASHINGTON IRVING 

agree with me," thought Rip, "and if this frolic should lay me 
up with a fit of the rheumatism, I shall have a blessed time 
with Dame Van Winkle." With some difficulty he got down 
into the glen; he found the gully up which he and his com- 
panion had ascended the preceding evening; but to his aston- 
ishment a mountain stream was now foaming down it, leaping 
from rock to rock, and filling the glen with babbling murmurs. 
He, however, made shift to scramble up its sides, working his 
toilsome way through thickets of birch, sassafras, and witch- 
hazel, and sometimes tripped up or entangled by the wild' 
grapevines that twisted their coils or tendrils from tree to 
tree, and spread a kind of network in his path. 

At length he reached to where the ravine had opened through 
the cliffs to the amphitheatre; but no traces of such opening 
remained. The rocks presented a high, impenetrable wall, 
over which the torrent came tumbling in a sheet of feathery 
foam, and fell into a broad, deep basin, black from the shad- 
ows of the surrounding forest. Here, then, poor Rip was 
brought to a stand. He again called ana whistled after his 
dog; he was only answered by the cawing of a flock of idle 
crows, sporting high in air about a dry tree that overhung a 
sunny precipice; and who, secure in their elevation, seemed to 
look down and scoff at the poor man's perplexities. What was 
to be done? the morning was passing away, and Rip felt fam- 
ished for want of his breakfast. He grieved to give up his dog 
and gun; he dreaded to meet his wife; but it would not do to 
starve among the mountains. He shook his head, shouldered 
the rusty firelock, and, with a heart full of trouble and anxiety, 
turned his steps homeward. 

As he approached the village he met a number of people, but 
none whom he knew, which somewhat surprised him, for he 
had thought himself acquainted with every one in the country 
round. Their dress, too, was of a different fashion from that 
to which he was accustomed. They all stared at him with equal 
marks of surprise, and whenever they cast their eyes upon him, 
invariably stroked their chins. The constant recurrence of this 
gesture induced Rip, involuntarily, to do the same, when, to 
his astonishment, he found his beard had grown a foot long! 

He had now entered the skirts of the village. A troop of 
strange children ran at his heels, hooting after him, and point- 



RIP VAN WINKLE 87 

ing at his gray beard. The dogs, too, not one of which he recog- 
nized for an old acquaintance, barked at him as he passed. The 
very village was altered; it was larger and more populous. 
There were rows of houses which he had never seen before, and 
those which had been his familiar haunts had disappeared. 
Strange names were over the doors — strange faces at the 
windows, — everything was strange. His mind now misgave 
him ; he began to doubt whether both he and the world around 
him were not bewitched. Surely this was his native village, 
which he had left but the day before. There stood the Kaatskill 
Mountains — there ran the silver Hudson at a distance — 
there was every hill and dale precisely as it had always been — 
Rip was sorely perplexed — "That flagon last night," thought 
he, "has addled my poor head sadly!" 

It was with some difficulty that he found the way to his own 
house, which he approached with silent awe, expecting every 
moment to hear the shrill voice of Dame Van Winkle. He 
found the house gone to decay — the roof fallen in, the win- 
dows shattered, and the doors off the hinges. A half -starved 
dog that looked like Wolf was skulking about it. Rip called 
him by name, but the cur snarled, showed his teeth, and passed 
on. This was an unkind cut indeed — "My very dog," sighed 
poor Rip, "has forgotten me!" 

He entered the house, which, to tell the truth, Dame Van 
Winkle had always kept in neat order. It was empty, forlorn, 
and apparently abandoned. This desolateness overcame all his 
connubial fears — he called loudly for his wife and children — 
the lonely chambers rang for a moment with his voice, and then 
again all was silence. 

He now hurried forth, and hastened to his old resort, the 
village inn — but it, too, was gone. A large, rickety wooden 
building stood in its place, with great gaping windows, some of 
them broken and mended with old hats and petticoats, and 
over the door was painted, "The Union Hotel, by Jonathan 
Doolittle." Instead of the great tree that used to shelter the 
quiet little Dutch inn of yore, there now was reared a tall 
naked pole, with something on the top that looked like a red 
night-cap, and from it was fluttering a flag, on which was a 
singular assemblage of stars and stripes — all this was strange 
and incomprehensible. He recognized on the sign, however, 



88 WASHINGTON IRVING 

the ruby face of King George, under which he had smoked so 
many a peaceful pipe; but even this was singularly metamor- 
phosed. The red coat was changed for one of blue and buff, a 
sword was held in the hand instead of a sceptre, the head was 
decorated with a cocked hat, and underneath was painted in 
large characters, General Washington. 

There was, as usual, a crowd of folk about the door, but none 
that Rip recollected. The very character of the people seemed 
changed. There was a busy, bustling, disputatious tone about 
it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquillity. 
He looked in vain for the sage Nicholas Vedder, with his broad 
face, double chin, and fair long pipe, uttering clouds of tobacco- 
smoke instead of idle speeches; or Van Bummel, the school- 
master, doling forth the contents of an ancient newspaper. In 
place of these, a lean, bilious-looking fellow, with his pockets 
full of handbills, was haranguing vehemently about rights of 
citizens — -elections — members of congress— liberty — Bunker's 
Hill — heroes of seventy-six — and other words, which were 
a perfect Babylonish jargon to the bewildered Van Winkle. 

The appearance of Rip, with his long grizzled beard, his rusty 
fowling-piece, his uncouth dress, and an army of women and 
children at his heels, soon attracted the attention of the tavern- 
politicians. They crowded round him, eying him from head to 
foot with great curiosity. The orator bustled up to him, and, 
drawing him partly aside, inquired "on which side he voted?" 
Rip started in vacant stupidity. Another short but busy little 
fellow pulled him by the arm, and, rising on tiptoe, inquired in 
his ear, "Whether he was Federal or Democrat?" Rip was 
equally at a loss to comprehend the question; when a knowing, 
self-important old gentleman, in a sharp cocked hat, made his 
way through the crowd, putting them to the right and left with 
his elbows as he passed, and planting himself before Van 
Winkle, with one arm akimbo, the other resting on his cane, 
his keen eyes and sharp hat penetrating, as it were, into his 
very soul, demanded in an austere tone, "what brought him 
to the election with a gun on his shoulder, and a mob at his heels 
and whether he meant to breed a riot in the village? " — "Alas! 
gentlemen," cried Rip, somewhat dismayed, "I am a poor quiet 
man, a native of the place, and a loyal subject of the king, God 
bless him!" 



RIP VAN WINKLE 89 

Here a general shout burst from the bystanders — "A tory! 
a tory! a spy! a refugee! hustle him! away with him!" It was 
with great difficulty that the self-important man in the cocked 
hat restored order; and, having assumed a tenfold austerity of 
brow, demanded again of the unknown culprit what he came 
there for, and whom he was seeking? The poor man humbly 
assured him that he meant no harm, but merely came there in 
search of some of his neighbors, who used to keep about the 
tavern. 

"Well — who are they? — name them." 

Rip bethought himself a moment, and inquired, "Where's 
Nicholas Vedder?" 

There was a silence for a little while, when an old man re- 
plied, in a thin, piping voice: "Nicholas Vedder! why, he is 
dead and gone these eighteen years ! There was a wooden tomb- 
stone in the churchyard that used to tell all about him, but 
that's rotten and gone too." 

"Where's Brom Dutcher?" 

"Oh, he went off to the army in the beginning of the war; 
some say he was killed at the storming of Stony Point — others 
say he was drowned in a squall at the foot of Antony's Nose. 1 
I don't know — he never came back again." 

"Where's Van Bummel, the school-master? 

"He went off to the wars too, was a great militia general, 
and is now in Congress." 

Rip's heart died away at hearing of these sad changes in his 
home and friends, and finding himself thus alone in the world. 
Every answer puzzled him too, by treating of such enormous 
lapses of time, and of matters which he could not understand : 
war — Congress — Stony Point; he had no courage to ask 
after any more friends, but cried out in despair, "Does nobody 
here know Rip Van Winkle?" 

"Oh, Rip Van Winkle!" exclaimed two or three, "Oh, to be 
sure! that's Rip Van Winkle yonder, leaning against the tree." 

Rip looked, and beheld a precise counterpart of himself, as 
he went up the mountain: apparently as lazy, and certainly as 
ragged. The poor fellow was now completely confounded. He 
doubted his own identity, and whether he was himself or 

x The legend concerning this promontory is explained in the History of New 
York, book vi, chap. iv. 



9 o WASHINGTON IRVING 

another man. In the midst of his bewilderment, the man in the 
cocked hat demanded who he was, and what was his name? 

"God knows," exclaimed he, at his wit's end; "I'm not my- 
self — I 'm somebody else — that 's me yonder — no — that 's 
somebody else got into my shoes — I was myself last night, 
but I fell asleep on the mountain, and they've changed my 
gun, and everything's changed, and I'm changed, and I can't 
tell what's my name, or who I am!" 

The bystanders began now to look at each other, nod, wink 
significantly, and tap their fingers against their foreheads. 
There was a whisper, also, about securing the gun, and keeping 
the old fellow from doing mischief, at the very suggestion of 
which the self-important man in the cocked hat retired with 
some precipitation. At this critical moment a fresh, comely 
woman pressed through the throng to get a peep at the gray- 
bearded man. She had a chubby child in her arms, which, 
frightened at his looks, began to cry. "Hush, Rip," cried she, 
"hush, you little fool; the old man won>tiurt you." The name 
of the child, the air of the mother, the tone of her voice, all 
awakened a train of recollections in his mind. "What is your 
name, my good woman?" asked he. 

"Judith Gardenier." 

"And your father's name?" 

"Ah, poor man, Rip Van Winkle was his name, but it's 
twenty years since he went away from home with his gun, and 
never has been heard of since, — his dog came home without 
him; but whether he shot himself, or was carried away by the 
Indians, nobody can tell. I was then but a little girl." 

Rip had but one question more to ask; and he put it with a 
faltering voice : — 

"Where's your mother?" 

"Oh, she too had died but a short time since; she broke a 
blood-vessel in a fit of passion at a New England peddler." 

There was a drop of comfort at least, in this intelligence. 
The honest man could contain himself no longer. He caught 
his daughter and her child in his arms. "I am your father!" 
cried he — "Young Rip Van Winkle once — old Rip Van 
Winkle now! Does nobody know poor Rip Van Winkle?" 

All stood amazed, until an old woman, tottering out from 
among the crowd, put her hand to her brow, and peering under 



RIP VAN WINKLE 91 

it in his face for a moment, exclaimed, "Sure enough it is Rip 
Van Winkle — it is himself! Welcome home again, old neigh- 
bor — Why, where have you been these twenty long years?" 

Rip's story was soon told, for the whole twenty years had 
been to him but as one night. The neighbors stared when they 
heard it; some were seen to wink at each other, and put their 
tongues in their cheeks; and the self-important man in the 
cocked hat, who, when the alarm was over, had returned to the 
field, screwed down the corners of his mouth, and shook his 
head — upon which there was a general shaking of the head 
throughout the assemblage. 

It was determined, however, to take the opinion of old Peter 
Vanderdonk, who was seen slowly advancing up the road. He 
was a descendant of the historian of that name, 1 who wrote one 
of the earliest accounts of the province. Peter was the most 
ancient inhabitant of the village, and well versed in all the 
wonderful events and traditions of the neighborhood. He recol- 
lected Rip at once, and corroborated his story in the most sat- 
isfactory manner. He assured the company that it was a fact, 
handed down from his ancestor the historian, that the Kaats- 
kill Mountains had always been haunted by strange beings. 
That it was affirmed that the great Hendrick Hudson, the first 
discoverer of the river and country, kept a kind of vigil there 
every twenty years, with his crew of the Half -moon ; being per- 
mitted in this way to revisit the scenes of his enterprise, and 
keep a guardian eye upon the river and the great city called by 
his name. That his father had once seen them in their old 
Dutch dresses playing at ninepins in a hollow of the mountain; 
and that he himself had heard, one summer afternoon, the 
sound of their balls like distant peals of thunder. 

To make a long story short, the company broke up, and re- 
turned to the more important concerns of the election. Rip's 
daughter took him home to live with her; she had a snug well- 
furnished house, and a stout cheery farmer for a husband, 
whom Rip recollected for one of the urchins that used to "climb 
upon his back. As to Rip's son and heir, who was the ditto of 
himself, seen leaning against the tree, he was employed to work 
on the farm; but evinced an hereditary disposition to attend to 
anything else but his business. 

1 Adrian van der Donck. 



92 WASHINGTON IRVING 

Rip now resumed his old walks and habits; he soon found 
many of his former cronies, though all rather the worse for the 
wear and tear of time ; and preferred making friends among the 
rising generation, with whom he soon grew into great favor. 

Having nothing to do at home, and being arrived at that 
happy age when a man can be idle with impunity, he took his 
place once more on the bench at the inn door, and was rever- 
enced as one of the patriarchs of the village, and a chronicle 
of the old times "before the war." It was some time before he 
could get into the regular track of gossip, or could be made to 
comprehend the strange events that had taken place during his 
torpor. How that there had been a revolutionary war — that 
the country had thrown off the yoke of old England — and 
that, instead of being a subject of His Majesty George the 
Third, he was now a free citizen of the United States. Rip, in 
fact, was no politician; the changes of states and empires made 
but little impression on him ; but there was one species of des- 
potism under which he had long groaned, and that was — petti- 
coat government. Happily that was at an end; he had got his 
neck out of the yoke of matrimony, and could go in and out 
whenever he pleased, without dreading the tyranny of Dame 
Van Winkle. Whenever her name was mentioned, however, 
he shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and cast up his eyes, 
which might pass either for an expression of resignation to his 
fate, or joy at his deliverance. 

He used to tell his story to every stranger that arrived at 
Mr. Doolittle's hotel. He was observed, at first, to vary on 
some points every time he told it, which was, doubtless, owing 
to his having so recently awaked. It at last settled down pre- 
cisely to the tale I have related, and not a man, woman, or 
child in the neighborhood but knew it by heart. Some always 
pretended to doubt the reality of it, and insisted that Rip had 
been out of his head, and that this was one point on which he 
always remained flighty. The old Dutch inhabitants, however, 
almost universally gave it full credit. Even to this day they 
never hear a thunder-storm of a summer afternoon about the 
Kaatskill, but they say Hendrick Hudson and his crew are at 
their game of ninepins; and it is a common wish of all hen- 
pecked husbands in the neighborhood, when life hangs heavy 
on their hands, that they might have a quieting draught out of 
Rip Van Winkle's flagon. 



RIP VAN WINKLE 93 

NOTE 

The foregoing Tale, one would suspect, had been suggested to Mr. 
Knickerbocker by a little German superstition about the Emperor 
Frederick der Rothbart, 1 and the Kypphaiiser mountain; the subjoined 
note, however, which he had appended, to the tale, shows that it is an 
absolute fact, narrated with his usual fidelity. 

"The story of Rip Van Winkle may seem incredible to many, but 
nevertheless I give it my full belief, for I know the vicinity of our old 
Dutch settlements to have been very subject to marvellous events and 
appearances. Indeed, I have heard many stranger stories than this, in 
the villages along the Hudson; all of which were too well authenticated to 
admit of a doubt. I have even talked with Rip Van Winkle myself, who, 
when last I saw him, was a very old venerable man, and so perfectly 
rational and consistent on every other point, that I think no conscientious 
person could refuse to take this into the bargain; nay, I have seen a certifi- 
cate on the subject taken before a country justice and signed with a cross, 
in the justice's own handwriting. The story therefore, is beyond the 
possibility of doubt. 

"D. K." 

POSTSCRIPT 

The following are travelling notes from a memorandum-book of Mr. 
Knickerbocker: — 

The Kaatsberg, or Catskill Mountains, have always been a region full 
of fable. The Indians considered them the abode of spirits, who influenced 
the weather, spreading sunshine or clouds over the landscape, and sending 
good or bad hunting seasons. They were ruled by an old squaw spirit, 
said to be their mother. She dwelt on the highest peak of the Catskills, 
and had charge of the doors of day and night to open and shut them at 
the proper hour. She hung up the new moons in the skies, and cut up the 
old ones into stars. In times of drought, if properly propitiated, she 
would spin light summer clouds out of cobwebs and morning dew, and 
send them off from the crest of the mountain, flake after flake, like flakes 
of carded cotton, to float in the air; until, dissolved by the heat of the sun, 
they would fall in gentle showers, causing the grass to spring, the fruits 
to ripen, and the corn to grow an inch an hour. If displeased, however, 
she would brew up clouds black as ink, sitting in the midst of them like a 
bottle-bellied spider in the midst of its web; and when these clouds broke, 
woe betide the valleys! 

In old times, say the Indian traditions, there was a kind of Manitou or 
Spirit, who kept about the wildest recesses of the Catskill Mountains, and 
took a mischievous pleasure in wreaking all kinds of evils and vexations 
upon the red men. Sometimes he would assume the form of a bear, a 

1 According to a legend, Frederick I. (1121-1190), called Barbarossa, der 
Rothbart (Redbeard) , instead of dying, lapsed into a profound sleep, from which 
he would awake when his country should need him. 



94 WASHINGTON IRVING 

panther, or a deer, lead the bewildered hunter a weary chase through 
tangled forest and among ragged rocks; and then spring off with a loud 
ho! ho! leaving him aghast on the brink of a beetling precipice or raging 
torrent. 

The favorite abode of this Manitou is still shown. It is a great rock or 
cliff on the loneliest part of the mountains, and from the flowering vines 
which clamber about it, and the wild flowers which abound in its neigh- 
borhood, is known by the name of the Garden Rock. Near the foot of it is 
a small lake, the haunt of the solitary bittern, with water-snakes basking 
in the sun on the leaves of the pond-lilies which lie on the surface. This 
place was held in great awe by the Indians, insomuch that the boldest 
hunter would not pursue his game within its precincts. Once upon a time, 
however, a hunter, who had lost his way, penetrated to the Garden Rock, 
where he beheld a number of gourds placed in the crotches of trees. One 
of these he seized and made off with it, but in the hurry of his retreat he 
let it fall among the rocks, when a great stream gushed forth, which 
washed him away and swept him down precipices, where he was dashed 
to pieces, and the stream made its way to the Hudson, and continues to 
flow to the present day; being the identical stream known by the name 
of the Kaaters-kill. 



JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 
THE CHASE 1 

Why, anything: 
An honorable murderer, if you will ; 
For nought I did in hate, but all in honor. 

Shakespeare, Othello, v, ii, 293. 

The bloody and inhuman scene rather incidentally men- 
tioned than described in the preceding chapter, is conspicuous 
in the pages of colonial history, by the merited title of "The 
Massacre of William Henry." 2 It so far deepened the stain 
which a previous and very similar event had left upon the repu- 
tation of the French commander, that it was not entirely erased 
by his early and glorious death. It is now becoming obscured 
by time; and thousands, who know that Montcalm died like a 
hero on the plains of Abraham, have yet to learn how much he 
was deficient in that moral courage without which no man can 
be truly great. Pages might be written to prove, from this illus- 
trious example, the defects of human excellence; to show how 
easy it is for generous sentiments, high courtesy, and chival- 
rous courage, to lose their influence beneath the chilling blight 
of selfishness, and to exhibit to the world a man who was great 
in all the minor attributes of character, but who was found 
wanting when it became necessary to prove how much principle 
is superior to policy. But the task would exceed our preroga- 
tives; and, as history, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes 
with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness, it is probable 
that Louis de Saint Veran will be viewed by posterity only as 

1 The Last of the Mohicans, chapters xviii-xx. The impulse to write this 
romance came to the author at Glens (or Glenns) Falls, during an excursion to 
Saratoga and Lake George with a party of English gentlemen, in the summer of 
1825. Stanley, afterwards Lord Derby, Prime Minister of England, having sug- 
gested that the caverns formed by the river were just the scene for a romance, 
Cooper promised to write a book in which they should play a part. He soon 
began to write, and completed the book in a few months. It was published in 
February, 1826. 

2 While the English, under the command of Colonel Munro, were filing out 
of Foft William Henry after the capitulation in August, 1757, they were treach- 
erously attacked by the Indian allies of the French. 



96 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 

the gallant defender of his country, while his cruel apathy on 
the shores of the Oswego and of the Horican 1 will be forgotten. 
Deeply regretting this weakness on the part of a sister muse, 
we shall at once retire from her sacred precincts, within the 
proper limits of our own humble vocation. 

The third day from the capture of the fort was drawing to a 
close, but the business of the narrative must still detain the 
reader on the shores of the "holy lake." When last seen, the 
environs of the works were rilled with violence and uproar. 
They were now possessed by stillness and death. The blood- 
stained conquerors had departed; and their camp, which had 
so lately rung with the merry rejoicings of a victorious army, 
lay a silent and deserted city of huts. The fortress was a 
smouldering ruin; charred rafters, fragments of exploded artil- 
lery, and rent mason-work, covering its earthen mounds in 
confused disorder. 

A frightful change had also occurred in the season. The sun 
had hid its warmth behind an impenetrable mass of vapor, and 
hundreds of human forms, which had blackened beneath the 
fierce heats of August, were stiffening in their deformity, before 
the blasts of a premature November. The curling and spotless 
mists, which had been seen sailing above the hills towards the 
north, were now returning in an interminable dusky sheet, 
that Was urged along by the fury of a tempest. The crowded 
mirror of the Horican was gone; and in its place the green and 
angry waters lashed the shores, as if indignantly casting back 
its impurities to the polluted strand. Still the clear fountain 
retained a portion of its charmed influence, but it reflected only 
the sombre gloom that fell from the impending heavens. That 
humid and congenial atmosphere which commonly adorned 
the view, veiling its harshness and softening its asperities, had 
disappeared, and the northern air poured across the waste of 
water so harsh and unmingled that nothing was left to be con- 
jectured by the eye, or fashioned by the fancy. 

The fiercer element had cropped the verdure of the plain, 
which looked as though it were scathed by the consuming 
lightning. But here and there a dark green tuft rose in the 
midst of the desolation; the earliest fruits of a soil that had 
been fattened with human blood. The whole landscape, which, 

1 Lake George. 



THE CHASE 97 

seen by a favoring light and in a genial temperature, had been 
found so lovely, appeared now like some pictured allegory of 
life, in which objects were arrayed in their harshest but truest 
colors, and without the relief of any shadowing. 

The solitary and arid blades of grass arose from the passing 
gusts fearfully perceptible; the bold and rocky mountains were 
too distinct in their barrenness, and the eye even sought relief, 
in vain, by attempting to pierce the illimitable void of heaven, 
which was shut to its gaze by the dusky sheet of ragged and 
driving vapor. 

The wind blew unequally; sometimes sweeping heavily along 
the ground, seeming to whisper its moanings in the cold ears of 
the dead, then rising in a shrill and mournful whistling, it 
entered the forest with a rush that filled the air with the leaves 
and branches it scattered in its path. Amid the unnatural 
shower, a few hungry ravens struggled with the gale; but no 
sooner was the green ocean of woods, which stretched beneath 
them, passed, than they gladly stooped, at random, to their 
hideous banquet. 

In short, it was a scene of wildness and desolation; and it 
appeared as if all who had profanely entered it had been 
stricken, at a blow, by the relentless arm of death. But the 
prohibition had ceased; and for the first time since the perpe- 
trators of those foul deeds which had assisted to disfigure the 
scene were gone, living human beings had now presumed to 
approach the place. 

About an hour before the setting of the sun, on the day 
already mentioned, the forms of five men might have been 
seen issuing from the narrow vista of trees, where the path to 
the Hudson entered the forest, and advancing in the direction 
of the ruined works. At first their progress was slow and 
guarded, as though they entered with reluctance amid the hor- 
rors of the spot, or dreaded the renewal of its frightful incidents. 
A light figure preceded the rest of the party, with the caution 
and activity of a native ; ascending every hillock to reconnoitre, 
and indicating, by gestures, to his companions, the route he 
deemed it most prudent to pursue. Nor were those in the rear 
wanting in every caution and foresight known to forest war- 
fare. One among them, he also was an Indian, moved a little 
on one flank, and watched the margin of the woods, with eyes 



98 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 

long accustomed to read the smallest sign of danger. The re- 
maining three were white, though clad in vestments adapted, 
both in quality and color, to their present hazardous pursuit, 
— that of hanging on the skirts of a retiring army in the wil- 
derness. 

The effects produced by the appalling sights that constantly 
arose in their path to the lake shore were as different as the 
characters of the respective individuals who composed the 
party. The youth in front threw serious but furtive glances at 
the mangled victims, as he stepped lightly across the plain, 
afraid to exhibit his feelings, and yet too inexperienced to quell 
entirely their sudden and powerful influence. His red associate, 
however, was superior to such a weakness. He passed the 
groups of dead with a steadiness of purpose, and an eye so 
calm, that nothing but long and inveterate practice could 
enable him to maintain. The sensations produced in the minds 
of even the white men were different, though uniformly sorrow- 
ful. One, whose gray locks and furrowed lineaments, blending 
with a martial air and tread, betrayed, in spite of the disguise 
of a woodsman's dress, a man long experienced in scenes of 
war, was not ashamed to groan aloud, whenever a spectacle of 
more than usual horror came under his view. The young man 
at his elbow shuddered, but seemed to suppress his feelings in 
tenderness to his companion. Of them all, the straggler who 
brought up the rear appeared alone to betray his real thoughts, 
without fear of observation or dread of consequences. He gazed 
at the most appalling sight with eyes and muscles that knew 
not how to waver, but with execrations so bitter and deep as 
to denote how much he denounced the crime of his enemies. 

The reader will perceive at once, in these respective charac- 
ters, the Mohicans, and their white friend, the scout; together 
with Munro and Heyward. It was, in truth, the father in quest 
of his children, attended by the youth who felt so deep a stake 
in their happiness, and those brave and trusty foresters, who 
had already proved their skill and fidelity through the trying 
scenes related. 1 

When Uncas, who moved in front, had reached the centre 

1 The father is Munro; his children are the dark-eyed Cora, and Alice, "she of 
the yellow locks and blue eyes," the betrothed of Heyward; the foresters are 
iLeatherstocking and the two Mohicans, Chingachgook and his son Uncas. 



THE CHASE 99 

of the plain, he raised a cry that drew his companions in a body- 
to the spot. The young warrior had halted over a group of 
females who lay in a cluster, a confused mass of dead. Not- 
withstanding the revolting horror of the exhibition, Munro 
and Heyward flew towards the festering heap, endeavoring, 
with a love that no unseemliness could extinguish, to discover 
whether any vestiges of those they sought were to be seen 
among the tattered and many-colored garments. The father 
and the lover found instant relief in the search; though each 
was condemned again to experience the misery of an uncer- 
tainty that was hardly less insupportable than the most revolt- 
ing truth. They were standing silent and thoughtful, around 
the melancholy pile, when the scout approached. Eyeing the 
sad spectacle with an angry countenance, the sturdy woods- 
man, for the first time since his entering the plain, spoke intel- 
ligibly and aloud : — 

"I have been on many a shocking field, and have followed a 
trail of blood for weary miles," he said, "but never have I 
found the hand of the devil so plain as it is here to be seen! 
Revenge is an Indian feeling, and all who know me know that 
there is no cross in my veins ; but this much will I say — here, 
in the face of heaven, and with the power of the Lord so mani- 
fest in this howling wilderness, — that should these Frenchers 
ever trust themselves again within the range of a ragged bullet, 
there is one rifle shall play its part, so long as flint will fire or 
powder burn ! I leave the tomahawk and knife to such as have 
a natural gift to use them. What say you, Chingachgook," he 
added in Delaware; "shall the Hurons boast of this to their 
women when the deep snows come?" 

A gleam of resentment flashed across the dark lineaments of 
the Mohican chief; he loosened his knife in his sheath, and then 
turning calmly from the sight, his countenance settled into a 
repose as deep as if he never knew the instigation of passion. 

"Montcalm! Montcalm!" continued the deeply resentful 
and less self-restrained scout; "they say a time must come, 
when all the deeds done in the flesh will be seen at a single look; 
and that by eyes cleared from mortal infirmities. Woe betide 
the wretch who is born to behold this plain, with the judgment 
hanging about his soul! Ha — as I am a man of white blood, 
yonder lies a red-skin, without the hair of his head where 



ioo JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 

nature rooted it! Look to him, Delaware; it may be one of your 
missing people; and he should have burial like a stout warrior. 
I see it in your eye, Sagamore: a Huron pays for this, afore the 
fall winds have blown away the scent of the blood!" 

Chingachgook approached the mutilated form, and turning 
it over, he found the distinguishing marks of one of those six 
allied tribes, or nations, as they were called, who, while they 
fought in the English ranks, were so deadly hostile to his own 
people. Spurning the loathsome object with his foot, he turned 
from it with the same indifference he would have quitted a 
brute carcass. The scout comprehended the action, and very 
deliberately pursued his own way, continuing, however, his 
denunciations against the French commander in the same 
resentful strain. 

"Nothing but vast wisdom and onlimited power should dare 
to sweep off men in multitudes," he added; "for it is only the 
one that can know the necessity of the judgment : and what is 
there, short of the other, that can replace the creatures of the 
Lord? I hold it a sin to kill the second buck afore the first is 
eaten, unless a march in the front, or an ambushment, be con- 
templated. It is a different matter with a few warriors in open 
and rugged fight, for 't is their gift to die with the rifle or the 
tomahawk in hand ; according as their natures may happen to 
be, white or red. Uncas, come this way, lad, and let the ravens 
settle upon the Mingo. I know, from often seeing it, that they 
have a craving for the flesh of an Oneida; and it is as well to let 
the bird follow the gift of its natural appetite." 

"Hugh!" exclaimed the young Mohican, rising on the ex- 
tremities of his feet, and gazing intently in his front, frighten- 
ing the raven to some other prey, by the sound and the action. 

"What is it, boy?" whispered the scout, lowering his tall 
form into a crouching attitude, like a panther about to take 
his leap ; " God send it be a tardy Frencher, skulking for plunder. 
I do believe Killdeer would take an oncommon range to-day!" 

Uncas, without making any reply, bounded away from the 
spot, and in the next instant he was seen tearing from a bush, 
and waving in triumph, a fragment of the green riding-veil of 
Cora. The movement, the exhibition, and the cry, which again 
burst from the lips of the young Mohican, instantly drew the 
whole party about him. 



THE CHASE 101 

"My child!" said Munro, speaking quick and wildly; "give 
me my child!" 

"Uncas will try," was the short and touching answer. The 
simple but meaning assurance was lost on the father, who 
seized the piece of gauze, and crushed it in his hand, while his 
eyes roamed fearfully among the bushes, as if he equally 
dreaded and hoped for the secrets they might reveal. 

"Here are no dead," said Heyward; "the storm seems not 
to have passed this way." 

"That's manifest; and clearer than the heavens above our 
heads," returned the undisturbed scout; "but either she, or 
they that have robbed her, have passed the bush; for I remem- 
ber the rag she wore to hide a face that all did love to look upon. 
Uncas, you are right; the dark-hair has been here, and she has 
fled like a frightened fawn, to the wood; none who could fly 
would remain to be murdered. Let us search for the marks she 
left; for to Indian eyes, I sometimes think even a humming- 
bird leaves his trail in the air." 

The young Mohican darted away at the suggestion, and the 
scout had hardly done speaking, before the former raised a 
cry of success from the margin of the forest. On reaching the 
spot, the anxious party perceived another portion of the veil 
fluttering on the lower branch of a beech. 

"Softly, softly," said the scout, extending his long rifle in 
front of the eager Heyward; "we now know our work, but the 
beauty of the trail must not be deformed. A step too soon may 
give us hours of trouble. We have them though ; that much is 
beyond denial." 

"Bless ye, bless ye, worthy man!" exclaimed Munro, 
"whither, then, have they fled, and where are my babes?" 

"The path they have taken depends on many chances. If 
they have gone alone, they are quite as likely to move in a 
circle as straight, and they may be within a dozen miles of us ; 
but if the Hurons, or any of the French Indians, have laid 
hands on them, 't is probable they are now near the borders of 
the Canadas. But what matters that?" continued the deliber- 
ate scout, observing the powerful anxiety and disappointment 
the listeners exhibited; "here are the Mohicans and I on one 
end of the trail, and, rely on it, we find the other, though they 
should be a hundred leagues asunder! Gently, gently, Uncas, 



102 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 

you are as impatient as a man in the settlements; you forget 
that light feet leave but faint marks!" 

"Hugh!" exclaimed Chingachgook, who had been occupied 
in examining an opening that had been evidently made through 
the low underbush, which skirted the forest; and who now 
stood erect, as he pointed downwards, in the attitude and with 
the air of a man who beheld a disgusting serpent. 

"Here is the palpable impression of the footstep of a man," 
cried Hey ward, bending over the indicated spot; "he has trod 
in the margin of this pool, and the mark cannot be mistaken. 
They are captives." 

"Better so than left to starve in the wilderness," returned 
the scout; "and they will leave a wider trail. I would wager 
fifty beaver skins against as many flints, that the Mohicans 
and I enter their wigwams within the month! Stoop to it, 
Uncas, and try what you can make of the moccasin; for moc- 
casin it plainly is, and no shoe." 

The young Mohican bent over the track, and removing the 
scattered leaves from around the place, he examined it with 
much of that sort of scrutiny that a money-dealer, in these days 
of pecuniary doubts, would bestow on a suspected due-bill. 
At length he arose from his knees, satisfied with the result of 
the examination. 

"Well, boy," demanded the attentive scout, "what does it 
say? can you make anything of the tell-tale? 

"LeRenard Subtil!" 

"Ha! that rampaging devil again! there never will be an end 
of his loping till Killdeer has said a friendly word to him." 

Heyward reluctantly admitted the truth of this intelligence, 
and now expressed rather his hopes than his doubts by say- 
ing, — 

"One moccasin is so much like another, it is probable there 
is some mistake." 

"One moccasin like another! you may as well say that one 
foot is like another; though we all know that some are long, 
and others short; some broad, and others narrow; some with 
high, and some with low insteps; some in-toed, and some out. 
One moccasin is no more like another than one book is like 
another; though they who can read in one are seldom able to 
tell the marks of the other. Which is all ordered for the best, 



THE CHASE 103 

giving to every man his natural advantages. Let me get down 
to it, Uncas; neither book nor moccasin is the worse for having 
two opinions, instead of one." The scout stooped to the task, 
and instantly added, "You are right, boy; here is the patch we 
saw so often in the other chase. And the fellow will drink when 
he can get an opportunity; your drinking Indian always learns 
to walk with a wider toe than the natural savage, it being the 
gift of a drunkard to straddle, whether of white or red skin. 
'T is just the length and breadth too! look at it, Sagamore; you 
measured the prints more than once, when we hunted the var- 
ments from Glenn's to the health-springs." 

Chingachgook complied; and after finishing his short ex- 
amination, he arose, and with a quiet demeanor, he merely 
pronounced the word — 

"Magua!" 

"Aye, 't is a settled thing; here then have passed the dark- 
hair and Magua." 

"And not Alice?" demanded Heyward. 

"Of her we have not yet seen the signs," returned the scout, 
looking closely around at the trees, the bushes, and the ground. 
"What have we there? Uncas, bring hither the thing you see 
dangling from yonder thorn-bush." 

When the Indian had complied, the scout received the prize, 
and holding it on high, he laughed in his silent but heartfelt 
manner. 

"'T is the tooting we'pon of the singer! 1 now we shall have 
a trail a priest might travel," he said. "Uncas, look for the 
marks of a shoe that is long enough to uphold six feet two of 
tottering human flesh. I begin to have some hopes of the fellow, 
since he has given up squalling to follow some better trade." 

"At least, he has been faithful to his trust," said Heyward; 
"and Cora and Alice are not without a friend." 

"Yes," said Hawk eye, dropping his rifle, and leaning on it 
with an air of visible contempt, "he will do their singing. Can 
he slay a buck for their dinner, journey by the moss on the 
beeches, or cut the throat of a Huron? If not, the first cat- 
bird 2 he meets is the cleverest of the two. Well, boy, any 
signs of such a foundation?" 

1 The "bore," — David. 

2 The powers of the American mocking-bird are generally known. But the 



104 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 

"Here is something like the footstep of one who has worn a 
shoe; can it be that of our friend?" 

"Touch the leaves lightly, or you'll disconsart the forma- 
tion. That! that is the print of a foot, but 't is the dark-hair's; 
and small it is, too, for one of such a noble height and grand 
appearance. The singer would cover it with his heel." 

"Where! let me look on the footsteps of my child," said 
Munro, shoving the bushes aside, and bending fondly over the 
nearly obliterated impression. Though the tread which had 
left the mark had been light and rapid, it was still plainly visi- 
ble. The aged soldier examined it with eyes that grew dim as he 
gazed; nor did he rise from his stooping posture until Heyward 
saw that he had watered the trace of his daughter's passage 
with a scalding tear. Willing to divert a distress which threat- 
ened each moment to break through the restraint of appear- 
ances, by giving the veteran something to do, the young man 
said to the scout, — 

"As we now possess these infallible signs, let us commence 
our march. A moment, at such a time, will appear an age to 
the captives." 

"It is not the swiftest leaping deer that gives the longest 
chase," returned Hawkeye, without moving his eyes from the 
different marks that had come under his view; "we know that 
the rampaging Huron has passed, — and the dark hair, — and 
the singer, — but where is she of the yellow locks and blue 
eyes? Though little, and far from being as bold as her sister, 
she is fair to the view, and pleasant in discourse. Has she no 
friend, that none care for her? " 

"God forbid she should ever want hundreds! Are we not 
now in her pursuit? for one, I will never cease the search till 
she be found." 

"In that case we may have to journey by different paths; 
for here she has not passed, light and little as her footstep 
would be." 

Heyward drew back, all his ardor to proceed seeming to van- 
ish on the instant. Without attending to this sudden change 

true mocking-bird is not found so far north as the State of New York, where it 
has, however, two substitutes of inferior excellence: the cat-bird, so often named 
by the scout, and the bird vulgarly called ground-thresher. Either of these two 
last birds is superior to the nightingale, or the lark, though, in general, the 
American birds are less musical than those of Europe. [Author's note.] 



THE CHASE 105 

in the other's humor, the scout, after musing a moment, con- 
tinued, — 

"There is no woman in this wilderness could leave such a 
print as that, but the dark-hair or her sister. We know that 
the first has been here, but where are the signs of the other? 
Let us push deeper on the trail, and if nothing offers, we must 
go back to the plain and strike another scent. Move on, Uncas, 
and keep your eyes on the dried leaves. I will watch the bushes, 
while your father shall run with a low nose to the ground. 
Move on, friends; the sun is getting behind the hills." 

"Is there nothing that I can do?" demanded the anxious 
Heyward. 

"You!" repeated the scout, who, with his red friends, was 
already advancing in the order he had prescribed; "yes, you 
can keep in our rear, and be careful not to cross the trail." 

Before they had proceeded many rods, the Indians stopped, 
and appeared to gaze at some signs on the earth, with more than 
their usual keenness. Both father and son spoke quick and 
loud, now looking at the object of their mutual admiration, 
and now regarding each other with the most unequivocal 
pleasure. 

"They have found the little foot!" exclaimed the scout, 
moving forward, without attending further to his own portion 
of the duty. "What have we here? An ambushment has been 
planted in the spot! No, by the truest rifle on the frontiers, 
here have been them one-sided horses again! Now the whole 
secret is out, and all is plain as the north star at midnight. Yes, 
here they have mounted. There the beasts have been bound to 
a sapling, in waiting; and yonder runs the broad path away to 
the north, in full sweep for the Canadas." 

"But still there are no signs of Alice, — of the younger Miss 
Munro," said Duncan. 

"Unless the shining bauble Uncas has just lifted from the 
ground should prove one. Pass it this way, lad, that we may 
look at it." 

Heyward instantly knew it for a trinket that Alice was fond 
of wearing, and which he recollected, with the tenacious mem- 
ory of a lover, to have seen, on the fatal morning of the massa- 
cre, dangling from the fair neck of his mistress. He seized the 
highly prized jewel; and as he proclaimed the fact, it vanished 



106 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 

from the eyes of the wondering scout, who in vain looked for 
it on the ground, long after it was warmly pressed against the 
beating heart of Duncan. 

"Pshaw!" said the disappointed Hawkeye, ceasing to rake 
the leaves with the breech of his rifle; "'t is a certain sign of 
age, when the sight begins to weaken. Such a glittering gewgaw, 
and not to be seen! Well, well, I can squint along a clouded 
barrel yet, and that is enough to settle all disputes between me 
and the Mingoes. I should like to find the thing too, if it were 
only to carry it to the right owner, and that would be bringing 
the two ends of what I call a long trail together, — for by this 
time the broad St. Lawrence, or, perhaps, the Great Lakes 
themselves, are atwixt us." 

"So much "the more reason why we should not delay our 
march," returned Heyward; "let us proceed." 

"Young blood and hot blood, they say, are much the same 
thing. We are not about to start on a squirrel hunt, or to drive 
a deer into the Horican, but to outlie for days and nights, and 
to stretch across a wilderness where the feet of men seldom go, 
and where no bookish knowledge would carry you through 
harmless. An Indian never starts on such an expedition with- 
out smoking over his council fire; and though a man of white 
blood, I honor their customs in this particular, seeing that they 
are deliberate and wise. We will therefore go back, and light 
our fire to-night in the ruins of the old fort, and in the morning 
we shall be fresh, and ready to undertake our work like men, 
and not like babbling women or eager boys." 

Heyward saw, by the manner of the scout, that altercation 
would be useless. Munro had again sunk into that sort of 
apathy which had beset him since his late overwhelming mis- 
fortunes, and from which he was apparently to be roused only 
by some new and powerful excitement. Making a merit of 
necessity, the young man took the veteran by the arm, and 
followed in the footsteps of the Indians and the scout, who had 
already begun to retrace the path which conducted them to 
the plain. 



THE CHASE 107 

Salarino. — Why, I am sure, if he forfeit, thou wilt not take his flesh; what's that 
good for? 

Shylock. — To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. 

Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, in, i, 53. 

The shades of evening had come to increase the dreariness 
of the place, when the party entered the ruins of William Henry. 
The scout and his companions immediately made their prepara- 
tions to pass the night there, but with an earnestness and sobri- 
ety of demeanor that betrayed how much the unusual horrors 
they had just witnessed worked on even their practiced feelings. 
A few fragments of rafters were reared against a blackened 
wall; and when Uncas had covered them slightly with brush, 
the temporary accommodations were deemed sufficient. The 
young Indian pointed towards his rude hut, when his labor was 
ended; and Heyward, who understood the meaning of the 
silent gesture, gently urged Munro to enter. Leaving the be- 
reaved old man alone with his sorrows, Duncan immediately 
returned into the open air, too much excited himself to seek the 
repose he had recommended to his veteran friend. 

While Hawkeye and the Indians lighted their fire, and took 
their evening's repast, a frugal meal of dried bear's meat, the 
young man paid a visit to that curtain of the dilapidated fort 
which looked out on the sheet of the Horican. The wind had 
fallen, and the waves were already rolling on the sandy beach 
beneath him in a more regular and tempered succession. The 
clouds, as if tired of their furious chase, were breaking asunder, 
the heavier volumes gathering in black masses about the hori- 
zon, while the lighter scud still hurried above the water, or 
eddied among the tops of the mountains, like broken flights 
of birds hovering around their roosts. Here and there a red 
and fiery star struggled through the drifting vapor, furnishing 
a lurid gleam of brightness to the dull aspect of the heavens. 
Within the bosom of the encircling hills, an impenetrable dark- 
ness had already settled; and the plain lay like a vast and 
deserted charnel-house, without omen or whisper to disturb 
the slumbers of its numerous and hapless tenants. 

Of this scene, so chillingly in accordance with the past, 
Duncan stood for many minutes a rapt observer. His eyes 
wandered from the bosom of the mound, where the foresters 
were seated around their glimmering fire, to the fainter light 
which still lingered in the skies, and then rested long and 



108 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 

anxiously on the embodied gloom which lay like a dreary void 
on that side of him where the dead reposed. He soon fancied 
that inexplicable sounds arose from the place, though so indis- 
tinct and stolen as to render not only their nature but even 
their existence uncertain. Ashamed of his apprehensions, the 
young man turned towards the water, and strove to divert his 
attention to the mimic stars that dimly glimmered on its mov- 
ing surface. Still, his too conscious ears performed their un- 
grateful duty, as if to warn him of some lurking danger. At 
length a swift trampling seemed, quite audibly, to rush 
athwart the darkness. Unable any longer to quiet his uneasiness. 
Duncan spoke in a low voice to the scout, requesting him to 
ascend the mound to the place where he stood. Hawkeye threw 
his rifle across an arm, and complied, but with an air so un- 
moved and calm as to prove how much he counted on the 
security of their position. 

"Listen! " said Duncan, when the other placed himself delib- 
erately at his elbow; "there are suppressed noises on the plain, 
which may show that Montcalm has not yet entirely deserted 
his conquest." 

"Then ears are better than eyes," said the undisturbed scout, 
who, having just deposited a portion of a bear between his 
grinders, spoke thick and slow, like one whose mouth was 
doubly occupied. "I myself saw him caged in Ty, with all his 
host; for your Frenchers, when they have done a clever thing, 
like to get back, and have a dance or a merry-making with the 
women over their success." 

"I know not. An Indian seldom sleeps in war, and plun- 
der may keep a Huron here after his tribe has departed. It 
would be well to extinguish the fire, and have a watch — 
listen! you hear the noise I mean!" 

"An Indian more rarely lurks about the graves. Though 
ready to slay, and not over-regardful of the means, he is com- 
monly content with the scalp, unless when blood is hot, and 
temper up; but after the spirit is once fairly gone, he forgets 
his enmity, and is willing to let the dead find their natural rest. 
Speaking of spirits, Major, are you of opinion that the heaven 
of a red-skin and of us whites will be one and the same?" 

"No doubt — no doubt. I thought I heard it again! or was 
it the rustling of the leaves in the top of the beech?" 



THE CHASE 109 

"For my own part," continued Hawkeye, turning his face, 
for a moment, in the direction indicated by Heyward, but with 
a vacant and careless manner, "I believe that paradise is or- 
dained for happiness; and that men will be indulged in it 
according to their dispositions and gifts. I therefore judge that 
a red-skin is not far from the truth when he believes he is to 
find them glorious hunting-grounds of which his traditions 
tell; nor, for that matter, do I think it would be any disparage- 
ment to a man without a cross to pass his time" — 

"You hear it again?" interrupted Duncan. 

"Aye, aye; when food is scarce, and when food is plenty, a 
wolf grows bold," said the unmoved scout. "There would be 
picking, too, among the skins of the devils, if there was light 
and time for the sport. But, concerning the life that is to come, 
Major: I have heard preachers say, in the settlements, that 
heaven was a place of rest. Now men's minds differ as to their 
ideas of enjoyment. For myself, and I say it with reverence to 
the ordering of Providence, it would be no great indulgence to 
be kept shut up in those mansions of which they preach, having 
a natural longing for motion and the chase." 

Duncan, who was now made to understand the nature of 
the noises he had heard, answered, with more attention to the 
subject which the humor of the scout had chosen for discussion, 
by saying, — 

"It is difficult to account for the feelings that may attend 
the last great change." 

"It would be a change, indeed, for a man who has passed his 
days in the open air," returned the single-minded scout; "and 
who has so often broken his fast on the head waters of the 
Hudson, to sleep within sound of the roaring Mohawk. But 
it is a comfort to know we serve a merciful Master, though we 
do it each after his fashion, and with great tracts of wilderness 
atween us — what goes there?" 

"Is it not the rushing of the wolves you have mentioned?" 

Hawkeye slowly shook his head, and beckoned for Duncan 
to follow him to a spot to which the glare from the fire did not 
extend. When he had taken this precaution, the scout placed 
himself in an attitude of intense attention, and listened long 
and keenly for a repetition of the low sound that had so unex- 
pectedly startled him. His vigilance, however, seemed exer- 



no JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 

cised in vain; for after a fruitless pause he whispered to 
Duncan, — 

"We must give a call to Uncas. The boy has Indian senses, 
and may hear what is hid from us; for being a white-skin, I will 
not deny my nature." 

The young Mohican, who was conversing in a low voice with 
his father, started as he heard the moaning of an owl, and 
springing on his feet he looked towards the black mounds, as if 
seeking the place whence the sounds proceeded. The scout re- 
peated the call, and in a few moments Duncan saw the figure 
of Uncas stealing cautiously along the rampart, to the spot 
where they stood. 

Hawkeye explained his wishes in a very few words, which 
were spoken in the Delaware tongue. So soon as Uncas was in 
possession of the reason why he was summoned, he threw him- 
self flat on the turf, where, to the eyes of Duncan, he appeared 
to lie quiet and motionless. Surprised at the immovable atti- 
tude of the young warrior, and curious to observe the manner 
in which he employed his faculties to obtain the desired infor- 
mation, Heyward advanced a few steps, and bent over the 
dark object on which he had kept his eyes riveted. Then it 
was he discovered that the form of Uncas had vanished, and 
that he beheld only the dark outline of an inequality in the 
embankment. 

"What has become of the Mohican?" he demanded of the 
scout, stepping back in amazement; "it was here that I saw 
him fall, and I could have sworn that here he yet remained." 

"Hist! speak lower; for we know not what ears are open, 
and the Mingoes are a quick-witted breed. As for Uncas, he is 
out on the plain, and the Maquas, if any such are about us, 
will find their equal." 

"You think that Montcalm has not called off all his Indians? 
Let us give the alarm to our companions, that we may stand to 
our arms. Here are five of us, who are not unused to meet an 
enemy." 

"Not a word to either, as you value life. Look at the Saga- 
more, how like a grand Indian chief he sits by the fire. If there 
are any skulkers out in the darkness, they will never discover, 
by his countenance, that we suspect danger at hand." 

"But they may discover him, and it will prove his death. 



THE CHASE in 

His person can be too plainly seen by the light of that fire, and 
he will become the first and most certain victim." 

"It is undeniable that now you speak the truth," returned 
the scout, betraying more anxiety than was usual; "yet what 
can be done? A single suspicious look might bring on an attack 
before we are ready to receive it. He knows, by the call I gave 
to Uncas, that we have struck a scent: I will tell him that we 
are on the trail of the Mingoes; his Indian nature will teach 
him how to act." 

The scout applied his fingers to his mouth, and raised a slow 
hissing sound, that caused Duncan, at first, to start aside, 
believing that he heard a serpent. The head of Chingachgook 
was resting on a hand, as he sat musing by himself; but the 
moment he heard the warning of the animal whose name he 
bore, it rose to an upright position, and his dark eyes glanced 
swiftly and keenly on every side of him. With this sudden and 
perhaps involuntary movement, every appearance of surprise 
or alarm ended. His rifle lay untouched, and apparently un- 
noticed, within reach of his hand. The tomahawk that he had 
loosened in his belt for the sake of ease, was even suffered to 
fall from its usual situation to the ground, and his form seemed 
to sink, like that of a man whose nerves and sinews were suf- 
fered to relax for the purpose of rest. Cunningly resuming his 
former position, though with a change of hands, as if the 
movement had been made merely to relieve the limb, the native 
awaited the result with a calmness and fortitude that none but 
an Indian warrior would have known how to exercise. 

But Heyward saw that while to a less instructed eye the 
Mohican chief appeared to slumber, his nostrils were expanded, 
his head was turned a little to one side, as if to assist the organs 
of hearing, and that his quick and rapid glances ran incessantly 
over every object within the power of his vision. 

"See the noble fellow!" whispered Hawkeye, pressing the 
arm of Heyward; "he knows that a look or a motion might 
disconsart our schemes, and put us at the mercy of them 
imps" — 

He was interrupted by the flash and report of a rifle. The 
air was filled with sparks of fire, around that spot where the 
eyes of Heyward were still fastened with admiration and won- 
der. A second look told him that Chingachgook had disap- 



ii2 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 

peared in the confusion. In the meantime, the scout had thrown 
forward his rifle, like one prepared for service, and awaited im- 
patiently the moment when an enemy might rise to view. But 
with the solitary and fruitless attempt made on the life of 
Chingachgook, the attack appeared to have terminated. Once 
or twice the listeners thought they could distinguish the dis- 
tant rustling of bushes, as bodies of some unknown description 
rushed through them; nor was it long before Hawkeye pointed 
out the "scampering of the wolves," as they fled precipitately 
before the passage of some intruder on their proper domains. 
After an impatient and breathless pause, a plunge was heard 
in the water, and it was immediately followed by the report of 
another rifle. 

"There goes Uncas!" said the scout: "the boy bears a smart 
piece! I know its crack, as well as a father knows the language 
of his child, for I carried the gun myself until a better offered." 

"What can this mean?" demanded Duncan: "we are 
watched, and, as it would seem, marked for destruction." 

"Yonder scattered brand can witness that no good was in- 
tended, and this Indian will testify that no harm has been 
done," returned the scout, dropping his rifle across his arm 
again, and following Chingachgook, who just then reappeared 
within the circle of light, into the bosom of the works. "How 
is it, Sagamore? Are the Mingoes upon us in earnest, or is it 
only one of those reptiles who hang upon the skirts of a war 
party, to scalp the dead, go in, and make their boast among the 
squaws of the valiant deeds done on the pale-faces?" 

Chingachgook very quietly resumed his seat; nor did he make 
-any reply, until after he had examined the firebrand which had 
been struck by the bullet, that had nearly proved fatal to him- 
self. After which, he was content to reply, holding a single 
finger up to view, with the English monosyllable, — 

"One." 

"I thought as much," returned Hawkeye, seating himself; 
"and as he had got the cover of the lake afore Uncas pulled 
upon him, it is more than probable the knave will sing his lies 
etbout some great ambushment, in which he was outlying on 
the trail of two Mohicans and a white hunter — for the officers 
can be considered as little better than idlers in such a skrim- 
nrage. Well, let him — let him. There are always some honest 



THE CHASE 113 

men in every nation, though heaven knows, too, that they are 
scarce among the Maquas, to look down an upstart when he 
brags ag'in the face of reason. The varlet sent his lead within 
whistle of your ears, Sagamore." 

Chingachgook turned a calm and incurious eye towards the 
place where the ball had struck, and then resumed his former 
attitude, with a composure that could not be disturbed by so 
trifling an incident. Just then Uncas glided into the circle, and 
seated himself at the fire, with the same appearance of indiffer- 
ence as was maintained by his father. 

Of these several movements Heyward was a deeply inter- 
ested and wondering observer. It appeared to him as though 
the foresters had some secret means of intelligence, which had 
escaped the vigilance of his own faculties. In place of that 
eager and garrulous narration with which a white youth would 
have endeavored to communicate, and perhaps exaggerate, 
that which had passed out in the darkness of the plain, the 
young warrior was seemingly content to let his deeds speak for 
themselves. It was, in fact, neither the moment nor the occa- 
sion for an Indian to boast of his exploits; and it is probable 
that had Heyward neglected to inquire, not another syllable 
would, just then, have been uttered on the subject. 

"What has become of our enemy, Uncas?" demanded Dun- 
can : "we heard your rifle, and hoped you had not fired in vain." 

The young chief removed a fold of his hunting shirt, and 
quietly exposed the fatal tuft of hair, which he bore as the sym- 
bol of victory. Chingachgook laid his hand on the scalp, and 
considered it for a moment with deep attention. Then dropping 
it, with disgust depicted in his strong features, he ejaculated, — 

"Oneida!" 

"Oneida!" repeated the scout, who was fast losing his in- 
terest in the scene, in an apathy nearly assimilated to that of 
his red associates, but who now advanced with uncommon 
earnestness to regard the bloody badge. "By the Lord, if the 
Oneidas are outlying upon the trail, we shall be flanked by 
devils on every side of us! Now, to white eyes there is no differ- 
ence between this bit of skin and that of any other Indian, and 
yet the Sagamore declares it came from the poll of a Mingo; 
nay, he even names the tribe of the poor devil with as much 
ease as if the scalp was the leaf of a book, and each hair a letter. 



ii4 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 

What right have Christian whites to boast of their learning, 
when a savage can read a language that would prove too much 
for the wisest of them all! What say you, lad; of what people 
was the knave?" 

Uncas raised his eyes to the face of the scout, and answered, 
in his soft voice, — 

" Oneida." 

"Oneida, again! when one Indian makes a declaration it is 
commonly true; but when he is supported by his people, set it 
down as gospel!" 

"The poor fellow has mistaken us for French," said Heyward ; 
"or he would not have attempted the life of a friend." 

"He mistake a Mohican in his paint for a Huron! You 
would be as likely to mistake the white-coated grenadiers of 
Montcalm for the scarlet jackets of the 'Royal Americans,'" 
returned the scout. "No, no, the sarpent knew his errand; nor 
was there any great mistake in the matter, for there is but little 
love atween a Delaware and a Mingo, let their tribes go out to 
right for whom they may, in a white quarrel. For that matter, 
though the Oneidas do serve his sacred Majesty, who is my 
own sovereign lord and master, I should not have deliberated 
long about letting off Killdeer at the imp myself had luck 
thrown him in my way." 

"That would have been an abuse of our treaties, and un- 
worthy of your character." 

"When a man consorts much with a people," continued 
Hawkeye, "if they are honest and he no knave, love will grow 
up atwixt them. It is true that white cunning has managed to 
throw the tribes into great confusion, as respects friends and 
enemies; so that the Hurons and the Oneidas, who speak the 
same tongue, cr what may be called the same, take each other's 
scalps, and the Delawares are divided among themselves; a 
few hanging about their great council fire on their own river, 
and fighting on the same side with the Mingoes, while the 
greater part are in the Canadas, out of natural enmity to the 
Maquas — thus throwing everything into disorder, and de- 
stroying all the harmony of warfare. Yet a red natur' is not 
likely to alter with every shift of policy; so that the love 
atwixt a Mohican and a Mingo is much like the regard be- 
tween a white man and a sarpent." 



THE CHASE 115 

"I regret to hear it; for I had believed those natives who 
dwelt within our boundaries had found us too just and liberal, 
not to identify themselves fully with our quarrels." 

"Why, I believe it is natur' to give a preference to one's 
own quarrels before those of strangers. Now, for myself, I do 
love justice; and therefore I will not say I hate a Mingo, for 
that may be unsuitable to my color and my religion, though I 
will just repeat, it may have been owing to the night that 
Killdeer had no hand in the death of this skulking Oneida." 

Then, as if satisfied with the force of his own reasons, what- 
ever might be their effect on the opinions of the other dispu- 
tant, the honest but implacable woodsman turned from the fire, 
content to let the controversy slumber. Heyward withdrew to 
the rampart, too uneasy and too little accustomed to the war- 
fare of the woods to remain at ease under the possibility of such 
insidious attacks. Not so, however, with the scout and the 
Mohicans. Those acute and long practiced senses, whose 
powers so often exceed the limits of all ordinary credulity, after 
having detected the danger, had enabled them to ascertain its 
magnitude and duration. Not one of the three appeared in 
the least to doubt their perfect security, as was indicated by 
the preparations that were soon made to sit in council over 
their future proceedings. 

The confusion of nations, and even of tribes, to which 
Hawkeye alluded, existed at that period in the fullest force. 
The great tie of language, and, of course, of a common origin, 
was severed in many places ; and it was one of its consequences, 
that the Delaware and the Mingo (as the people of the Six 
Nations were called) were found fighting in the same ranks, 
while the latter sought the scalp of the Huron, though believed 
to be the root of his own stock. The Delawares were even di- 
vided among themselves. Though love for the soil which had 
belonged to his ancestors kept the Sagamore of the Mohicans 
with a small band of followers who were serving at Edward, 
under the banners of the English king, by far the largest por- 
tion of his nation were known to be in the field as allies of 
Montcalm. The reader probably knows, if enough has not 
already been gleaned from this narrative, that the Delaware, 
or Lenape, claimed to be the progenitors of that numerous 
people who once were masters of most of the Eastern and 



n6 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 

Northern States of America, of whom the community of the 
Mohicans was an ancient and highly honored member. 

It was, of course, with a perfect understanding of the minute 
and intricate interests which had armed friend against friend, 
and brought natural enemies to combat by each other's side, 
that the scout and his companions now disposed themselves to 
deliberate on the measures that were to govern their future 
movements, amid so many jarring and savage races of men. 
Duncan knew enough of Indian customs to understand the 
reason that the fire was replenished, and why the warriors, not 
excepting Hawkeye, took their seats within the curl of its 
smoke with so much gravity and decorum. Placing himself at 
an angle of the works, where he might be a spectator of the 
scene within, while he kept a watchful eye against any danger 
from without, he awaited the result with as much patience as 
he could summon. 

After a short and impressive pause, Chingachgook lighted a 
pipe whose bowl was curiously carved in one of the soft stones 
of the country, and whose stem was a tube of wood, and com- 
menced smoking. When he had inhaled enough of the fragrance 
of the soothing weed, he passed the instrument into the hands 
of the scout. In this manner the pipe had made its rounds three 
several times, amid the most profound silence, before either of 
the party opened his lips. Then the Sagamore, as the oldest 
and highest in rank, in a few calm and dignified words proposed 
the subject for deliberation. He was answered by the scout, 
and Chingachgook rejoined when the other objected to his 
opinions. But the youthful Uncas continued a silent and re- 
spectful listener, until Hawkeye, in complaisance, demanded 
his opinion. Hey ward gathered from the manners of the differ- 
ent speakers that the father and son espoused one side of a dis- 
puted question, while the white man maintained the other. 
The contest gradually grew warmer, until it was quite evident 
the feelings of the speakers began to be somewhat enlisted in 
the debate. 

Notwithstanding the increasing warmth of the amicable 
contest, the most decorous Christian assembly, not even ex- 
cepting those in which its reverend ministers are collected, 
might have learned a wholesome lesson of moderation from the 
forbearance and courtesy of the disputants. The words of 



THE CHASE 117 

Uncas were received with the same deep attention as those 
which fell from the maturer wisdom of his father; and so far 
from manifesting any impatience, neither spoke in reply, until 
a few moments of silent meditation were, seemingly, bestowed 
in deliberating on what had already been said. 

The language of the Mohicans was accompanied by gestures 
so direct and natural, that Heyward had but little difficulty in 
following the thread of their argument. On the other hand, 
the scout was obscure; because, from the lingering pride of 
color, he rather affected the cold and artificial manner which 
characterizes all classes of Anglo-Americans, when unexcited. 
By the frequency with which the Indians described the marks 
of a forest trail, it was evident they urged a pursuit by land, 
while the repeated sweep of Hawkeye's arm towards the 
Horican denoted that he was for a passage across its waters. 

The latter was, to every appearance, fast losing ground, and 
the point was about to be decided against him, when he arose 
to his feet, and shaking off his apathy, he suddenly assumed 
the manner of an Indian, and adopted all the arts of native 
eloquence. Elevating an arm, he pointed out the track of the 
sun, repeating the gesture for every day that was necessary to 
accomplish their object. Then he delineated a long and painful 
path, amid rocks and water-courses. The age and weakness of 
the slumbering and unconscious Munro were indicated by signs 
too palpable to be mistaken. Duncan perceived that even his 
own powers were spoken lightly of, as the scout extended his 
palm, and mentioned him by the appellation of the "Open 
Hand," — a name his liberality had purchased of all the 
friendly tribes. Then came a representation of the light and 
graceful movements of a canoe, set in forcible contrast to the 
tottering steps of one enfeebled and tired. He concluded by 
pointing to the scalp of the Oneida, and apparently urging the 
necessity of their departing speedily, and in a manner that 
should leave no trail. 

The Mohicans listened gravely, and with countenances that 
reflected the sentiments of the speaker. Conviction gradually 
wrought its influence, and towards the close of Hawkeye's 
speech, his sentences were accompanied by the customary 
exclamation of commendation. In short, Uncas and his father 
became converts to his way of thinking, abandoning their own 



n8 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 

previously expressed opinions with a liberality and candor that, 
had they been the representatives of some great and civilized 
people, would have infallibly worked their political ruin, by 
destroying forever their reputation for consistency. 

The instant the matter in discussion was decided, the debate, 
and everything connected with it, except the result, appeared 
to be forgotten. Hawkeye, without looking round to read his 
triumph in applauding eyes, very composedly stretched his 
tall frame before the dying embers, and closed his own organs 
in sleep. 

Left now in a measure to themselves, the Mohicans, whose 
time had been so much devoted to the interests of others, 
seized the moment to devote some attention to themselves. 
Casting off, at once, the grave and austere demeanor of an 
Indian chief, Chingachgook commenced speaking to his son in 
the soft and playful tones of affection. Uncas gladly met the 
familiar air of his father; and before the hard breathing of the 
scout announced that he slept, a complete change was effected 
in the manner of his two associates. 

It is impossible to describe the music of their language, while 
thus engaged in laughter and endearments, in such a way as to 
render it intelligible to those whose ears have never listened to 
its melody. The compass of their voices, particularly that of 
the youth, was wonderful, — extending from the deepest bass 
to tones that were even feminine in softness. The eyes of the 
father followed the plastic and ingenious movements of the 
son with open delight, and he never failed to smile in reply to 
the other's contagious, but low laughter. While under the in- 
fluence of these gentle and natural feelings, no trace of feroc- 
ity was to be seen in the softened features of the Sagamore. 
His figured panoply of death looked more like a disguise as- 
sumed in mockery, than a fierce annunciation of a desire to 
carry destruction in his footsteps. 

After an hour passed in the indulgence of their better feel- 
ings, Chingachgook abruptly announced his desire to sleep, by 
wrapping his head in his blanket, and stretching his form on 
the naked earth. The merriment of Uncas instantly ceased; 
and carefully raking the coals in such a manner that they 
should impart their warmth to his father's feet, the youth 
sought his own pillow among the ruins of the place. 



THE CHASE 119 

Imbibing renewed confidence from the security of these ex- 
perienced foresters, Heyward soon imitated their example; 
and long before the night had turned, they who lay in the bosom 
of the ruined work seemed to slumber as heavily as the uncon- 
scious multitude whose bones were already beginning to bleach 
on the surrounding plain. 



Land of Albania! let me bend mine eyes 
On thee, thou rugged nurse of savage men! 

Byron, Childe Harold, canto n, xxxviii. 

The heavens were still studded with stars when Hawkeye 
came to arouse the sleepers. Casting aside their cloaks, Munro 
and Heyward were on their feet while the woodsman was still 
making his low calls, at the entrance of the rude shelter where 
they had passed the night. When they issued from beneath its 
concealment, they found the scout awaiting their appearance 
nigh by, and the only salutation between them was the signifi- 
cant gesture for silence, made by their sagacious leader. 

"Think over your prayers," he whispered, as they approached 
him; "for He to whom you make them knows all tongues; that 
of the heart, as well as those of the mouth. But speak not a 
syllable; it is rare for a white voice to pitch itself properly in 
the woods, as we have seen by the example of that miserable 
devil, the singer. Come," he continued, turning towards a 
curtain of the works; "let us get into the ditch on this side, and 
be regardful to step on the stones and fragments of wood as 
you go." 

His companions complied, though to two of them the reasons 
of this extraordinary precaution were yet a mystery. When 
they were in the low cavity that surrounded the earthen fort 
on three sides, they found the passage nearly choked by the 
ruins. With care and patience, however, they succeeded in 
clambering after the scout, until they reached the sandy shore 
of the Horican. 

"That's a trail that nothing but a nose can follow," said the 
satisfied scout, looking back along their difficult way; "grass is 
a treacherous carpet for a flying party to tread on, but wood 
and stone take no print from a moccasin. Had you worn your 
armed boots, there might, indeed, have been something to 
fear; but with the deer-skin suitably prepared, a man may trust 



i2o JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 

himself, generally, on rocks with safety. Shove in the canoe 
nigher to the land, Uncas; this sand will take a stamp as easily 
as the butter of the Jarmans on the Mohawk. Softly, lad, 
softly; it must not touch the beach, or the knaves will know by 
what road we have left the place." 

The young man observed the precaution; and the scout, lay- 
ing a board from the ruins to the canoe, made a sign for the 
two officers to enter. When this was done, everything was 
studiously restored to it's former disorder; and then Hawkeye 
succeeded in reaching his little birchen vessel without leaving 
behind him any of those marks which he appeared so much to 
dread. Heyward was silent, until the Indians had cautiously 
paddled the canoe some distance from the fort, and within the 
broad and dark shadow that fell from the eastern mountain on 
the glassy surface of the lake; then he demanded, — 

"What need have we for this stolen and hurried departure? " 

"If the blood of an Oneida could stain such a sheet of pure 
water as this we float on," returned the scout, "your two eyes 
would answer your own question. Have you forgotten the 
skulking reptyle that Uncas slew?" 

"By no means. But he was said to be alone, and dead men 
give no cause for fear." 

"Aye, he was alone in his deviltry! but an Indian whose 
tribe counts so many warriors need seldom fear his blood will 
run without the death-shriek coming speedily from some of his 
enemies." 

"But our presence — .the authority of Colonel Munro — 
would prove a sufficient protection against the danger of our 
allies, especially in a case where the wretch so well merited his 
fate. I trust in Heaven you have not deviated a single foot 
from the direct line of our course, with so slight a reason!" 

"Do you think the bullet of that varlet's rifle would have 
turned aside, though his sacred Majesty the King had stood in 
its path?" returned the stubborn scout. "Why did not the 
grand Frencher, he who is captain-general of the Canadas, 
bury the tomahawks of the Hurons, if a word from a white 
can work so strongly on the natur' of an Indian? " 

The reply of Heyward was interrupted by a groan from 
Munro; but after he had paused a moment, in deference to the 
sorrow of his aged friend, he resumed the subject. 



THE CHASE 121 

"The Marquis of Montcalm can only settle that error with, 
his God," said the young man solemnly. 

"Aye, aye; now there is reason in your words, for they are 
bottomed on religion and honesty. There is a vast difference 
between throwing a regiment of white coats atwixt the tribes 
and the prisoners, and coaxing an angry savage to forget he 
carries a knife and a rifle, with words that must begin with 
calling him your son. No, no," continued the scout, looking 
back at the dim shore of William Henry, which was now fast 
receding, and laughing in his own silent but heartfelt manner; 
"I have put a trail of water atween us; and unless the imps 
can make friends with the fishes, and hear who has paddled 
across their basin this fine morning, we shall throw the length 
of the Horican behind us'before they have made up their minds 
which path to take." 

"With foes in front, and foes in our rear, our journey is like 
to be one of danger." 

"Danger!" repeated Hawkeye, calmly; "no, not absolutely 
of danger; for, with vigilant ears and quick eyes, we can man- 
age to keep a few hours ahead of the knaves; or, if we must try 
the rifle, there are three of us who understand its gifts as well as 
any you can name on the borders. No, not of danger; but that 
we shall have what you may call a brisk push of it, is probable; 
and it may happen, a brush, a skrimmage, or some such divar- 
sion, but always where covers are good, and ammunition abun- 
dant." 

It is possible that Heyward's estimate of danger differed in 
some degree from that of the scout, for, instead of replying, he 
now sat in silence, while the canoe glided over several miles of 
water. Just as the day dawned, they entered the narrows of 
the lake, 1 and stole swiftly and cautiously among their number- 

1 The beauties of Lake George are well known to every American tourist. In 
the height of the mountains which surround it, and in artificial accessories, it is 
inferior to the finest of the Swiss and Italian lakes, while in outline and purity 
of water it is fully their equal, and in the number and disposition of its isles and 
islets much superior to them all together. There are said to be some hundreds of 
islands in a sheet of water less than thirty miles long. The narrows which con- 
nect what may be called, in truth, two lakes, are crowded with islands to such a 
degree as to leave passages between them frequently of only a few feet in width. 
The lake itself varies in breadth from one to three miles. 

The State of New York is remarkable for the number and beauty of its lakes. 
One of its frontiers lies on the vast sheet of Ontario, while Champlain stretches 



122 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 

less little islands. It was by this road that Montcalm had re- 
tired with his army, and the adventurers knew not but he had 
left some of his Indians in ambush, to protect the rear of his 
forces, and collect the stragglers. They therefore approached 
the passage with the customary silence of their guarded 
habits. 

Chingachgook laid aside his paddle; while Uncas and the 
scout urged the light vessel through crooked and intricate 
channels, where every foot that they advanced exposed them 
to the danger of some sudden rising on their progress. The eyes 
of the Sagamore moved warily from islet to islet and copse to 
copse as the canoe proceeded; and when a clearer sheet of 
water permitted, his keen vision was bent along the bald rocks 
and impending forests that frowned upon the narrow strait. 

Heyward, who was a doubly interested spectator, as well 
from the beauties of the place as from the apprehensions nat- 
ural to his situation, was just believing that he had permitted 
the latter to be excited without sufficient reason, when the 
paddle ceased moving, in obedience to a signal from Chingach- 
gook. 

"Hugh!" exclaimed Uncas, nearly at the moment that the 
light tap his father had made on the side of the canoe notified 
them of the vicinity of danger. 

"What now?" asked the scout; "the lake is as smooth as if 
the winds had never blown, and I can see along its sheet for 
miles; there is not so much as the black head of a loon dotting 
the water." 

The Indian gravely raised his paddle, and pointed in the 
direction in which his own steady look was riveted. Duncan's 
eyes followed the motion. A few rods in their front lay another 
of the low wooded islets, but it appeared as calm and peaceful 
as if its solitude had never been disturbed by the foot of man. 

"I see nothing," he said, "but land and water; and a lovely 
scene it is." 

"Hist!" interrupted the scout. "Aye, Sagamore, there is 
always a reason for what you do. 'T is but a shade and yet it 
is not natural. You see the mist, Major, that is rising above 

nearly a hundred miles along another. Oneida, Cayuga, Canandaigua, Seneca, 
and George, are all lakes of thirty miles in length, while those of a size smaller 
are without number. [Author's note.] 



THE CHASE 123 

the island; you can't call it a fog, for it is more like a streak of 
thin cloud" — 

"It is vapor from the water." 

"That a child could tell. But what is the edging of blacker 
smoke that hangs along its lower side, and which you may 
trace down into the thicket of hazel? 'T is from a fire; but one 
that, in my judgment, has been suffered to burn low." 

"Let us then push for the place, and relieve our doubts," 
said the impatient Duncan; " the party must be small that can 
lie on such a bit of land." 

"If you judge of Indian cunning by the rules you find in 
books, or by white sagacity, they will lead you astray, if not 
to your death," returned Hawkeye, examining the signs of the 
place with that acuteness which distinguished him. "If I may 
be permitted to speak in this matter, it will be to say that we 
have but two things to choose between: the one is to return, 
and give up all thoughts of following the Hurons" — 

"Never!" exclaimed Hey ward, in a voice far too loud for 
their circumstances. 

"Well, well," continued Hawkeye, making a hasty sign to 
repress his impatience; "I am much of your mind myself, 
though I thought it becoming my experience to tell the whole. 
We must then make a push, and, if the Indians or Frenchers 
are in the narrows, run the gauntlet through these toppling 
mountains. Is there reason in my words, Sagamore?" 

The Indian made no other answer than by dropping his 
paddle into the water, and urging forward the canoe. As he 
held the office of directing its course, his resolution was suffi- 
ciently indicated by the movement. The whole party now 
plied their paddles vigorously, and in a very few moments they 
had reached a point whence they might command an entire 
view of the northern shore of the island, the side that had hith- 
erto been concealed. 

"There they are, by all the truth of signs," whispered the 
scout; " two canoes and a smoke. The knaves have n't yet got 
their eyes out of the mist, or we should hear the accursed whoop. 
Together, friends! we are leaving them, and are already nearly 
out of whistle of a bullet." 

The well-known crack of a rifle, whose ball came skipping 
along the placid surface of the strait, and a shrill yell from the 



124 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 

island, interrupted his speech, and announced that their pas- 
sage was discovered. In another instant several savages were 
seen rushing into the canoes, which were soon dancing over the 
water, in pursuit. These fearful precursors of a coming struggle 
produced no change in the countenances and movements of his 
three guides, so far as Duncan could discover, except that the 
strokes of their paddles were longer and more in unison, and 
caused the little bark to spring forward like a creature possess- 
ing life and volition. 

"Hold them there, Sagamore," said Hawkeye, looking coolly 
backward over his left shoulder, while he still plied his paddle; 
"keep them just there. Them Hurons have never a piece in 
their nation that will execute at this distance; but Killdeer has 
a barrel on which a man may calculate." 

The scout, having ascertained that the Mohicans were suffi- 
cient of themselves to maintain the requisite distance, delib- 
erately laid aside his paddle, and raised the fatal rifle. Three 
several times he brought the piece to his shoulder, and when 
his companions were expecting its report, he as often lowered 
it to request the Indians would permit their enemies to ap- 
proach a little nigher. At length his accurate and fastidious 
eye seemed satisfied, and throwing out his left arm on the bar- 
rel, he was slowly elevating the muzzle, when an exclamation 
from Uncas, who sat in the bow, once more caused him to sus- 
pend the shot. 

"What now, lad?" demanded Hawkeye; "you saved a 
Huron from the death-shriek by that word; have you reason 
for what you do? " 

Uncas pointed towards the rocky shore a little in their front, 
whence another war canoe was darting directly across their 
course. It was too obvious now that their situation was immi- 
nently perilous, to need the aid of language to confirm it. The 
scout laid aside his rifle, and resumed the paddle, while Chin- 
gachgook inclined the bows of the canoe a little towards the 
western shore, in order to increase the distance between them 
and this new enemy. In the mean time they were reminded of 
the presence of those who pressed upon their rear, by wild and 
exulting shouts. The stirring scene awakened even Munro 
from his apathy. 

"Let us make for the rocks on the main," he said, with the 



THE CHASE 125 

mien of a tried soldier, "and give battle to the savages. God 
forbid that I, or those attached to me and mine, should ever 
trust again to the faith of any servant of the Louis's!" 

"He who wishes to prosper in Indian warfare," returned the 
scout, "must not be too proud to learn from the wit of a native. 
Lay her more along the land, Sagamore; we are doubling on the 
varlets, and perhaps they may try to strike our trail on the 
long calculation." 

Hawkeye was not mistaken; for when the Hurons found 
their course was likely to throw them behind their chase, they 
rendered it less direct, until, by gradually bearing more and 
more obliquely, the two canoes were, ere long, gliding on paral- 
lel lines, within two hundred yards of each other. It now be- 
came entirely a trial of speed. So rapid was the progress of the 
light vessels, that the lake curled in their front, in miniature 
waves, and their motion became undulating by its own veloc- 
ity. It was, perhaps, owing to this circumstance, in addition 
to the necessity of keeping every hand employed at the paddles, 
that the Hurons had not immediate recourse to their firearms. 
The exertions of the fugitives were too severe to continue long, 
and the pursuers had the advantage of numbers. Duncan 
observed, with uneasiness, that the scout began to look anx- 
iously about him, as if searching for some further means of 
assisting their flight. 

"Edge her a little more from the sun, Sagamore," said the 
stubborn woodsman; "I see the knaves are sparing a man to 
the rifle. A single broken bone might lose us our scalps. Edge 
more from the sun and we will put the island between us." 

The expedient was not without its use. A long, low island 
lay at a little distance before them, and as they closed with it, 
the chasing canoe was compelled to take a side opposite to that 
on which the pursued passed. The scout and his companions 
did not neglect this advantage, but the instant they were hid 
from observation by the bushes, they redoubled efforts that 
before had seemed prodigious. The two canoes came round the 
last low point like two coursers at the top of their speed, the 
fugitives taking the lead. This change had brought them 
nigher to each other, however, while it altered their relative 
positions. 

"You showed knowledge in the shaping of birchen bark, 



126 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 

Uncas, when you chose this from among the Huron canoes," 
said the scout, smiling, apparently more in satisfaction at their 
superiority in the race, than from that prospect of final escape 
which now began to open a little upon them. "The imps have 
put all their strength again at the paddles, and we are to strug- 
gle for our scalps with bits of flattened wood, instead of clouded 
barrels and true eyes. A long stroke, and together, friends." 

"They are preparing for a shot," said Heyward; "and as we 
are in a line with them, it can scarcely fail." 

"Get you then into the bottom of the canoe," returned the 
scout; "you and the colonel; it will be so much taken from the 
size of the mark." 

Heyward smiled, as he answered, — 

"It would be but an ill example for the highest in rank to 
dodge, while the warriors were under fire!" 

"Lord ! Lord ! That is now a white man's courage ! " exclaimed 
the scout; "and like too many of his notions, not to be main- 
tained by reason. Do you think the Sagamore, or Uncas, or 
even I, who am a man without a cross, would deliberate about 
finding a cover in the skrimmage, when an open body would do 
no good? For what have the Frenchers reared up their Quebec, 
if fighting is always to be done in the clearings?" 

"All that. you say is very true, my friend," replied Heyward; 
"still, our customs must prevent us from doing as you wish." 

A volley from the Hurons interrupted the discourse, and as 
the bullets whistled about them, Duncan saw the head of 
Uncas turned, looking back at himself and Munro. Notwith- 
standing the nearness of the enemy, and his own great personal 
danger, the countenance of the young warrior expressed no 
other emotion, as the former was compelled to think, than 
amazement at rinding men willing to encounter so useless an 
exposure. Chingachgook was probably better acquainted with 
the notions of white men, for he did not even cast a glance aside 
from the riveted look his eye maintained on the object by which 
he governed their course. A ball soon struck the light and 
polished paddle from the hands of the chief, and drove it 
through the air, far in the advance. A shout arose from the 
Hurons, who seized the opportunity to fire another volley. 
Uncas described an arc in the water with his own blade, and as 
the canoe passed swiftly on, Chingachgook recovered his pad- 



THE CHASE 127 

die, and flourishing it on high, he gave the war-whoop of the 
Mohicans, and then lent his strength and skill again to the 
important task. 

The clamorous sounds of "Le Gros Serpent!" "La Longue 
Carabine!" "Le Cerf Agile!" burst at once from the canoes 
behind, and seemed to give new zeal to the pursuers. The scout 
seized Killdeer in his left hand, and elevating it above his head, 
he shook it in triumph at his enemies. The savages answered 
the insult with a yell, and immediately another volley suc- 
ceeded. The bullets pattered along the lake, and one even 
pierced the bark of their little vessel. No perceptible emotion 
could be discovered in the Mohicans during this critical mo- 
ment, their rigid features expressing neither hope nor alarm; 
but the scout again turned his head, and laughing in his own 
silent manner, he said to Heyward, — 

"The knaves love to hear the sounds of their pieces, but 
the eye is not to be found among the Mingoes that can cal- 
culate a true range in a dancing canoe! You see the dumb 
devils have taken off a man to charge, and by the smallest 
measurement that can be allowed, we move three feet to their 
two!" 

Duncan, who was not altogether as easy under this nice 
estimate of distances as his companions, was glad to find, how- 
ever, that owing to their superior dexterity, and the diversion 
among their enemies, they were very sensibly obtaining the 
advantage. The Hurons soon fired again, and a bullet struck 
the blade of Hawkeye's paddle without injury. 

"That will do," said the scout, examining the slight inden- 
tation with a curious eye; "it would not have cut the skin of 
an infant, much less of men who, like us, have been blown 
upon by the heavens in their anger. Now, Major, if you will 
try to use this piece of flattened wood, I'll let Killdeer take a 
part in the conversation." 

Heyward seized the paddle, and applied himself to the 
work with an eagerness that supplied the place of skill, while 
Hawkeye was engaged in inspecting the priming of his rifle. 
The latter then took a swift aim, and fired. The Huron in the 
bows of the leading canoe had risen with a similar object, and 
he now fell backward, suffering his gun to escape from his 
hands into the water. In an instant, however, he recovered his 



128 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 

feet, though his gestures were wild and bewildered. At the 
same moment his companions suspended their efforts, and the 
chasing canoes clustered together, and became stationary. 
Chingachgook and Uncas profited by the interval to regain 
their wind, though Duncan continued to work with the most 
persevering industry. The father and son now cast calm but 
inquiring glances at each other, to learn if either had sustained 
any injury by the fire; for both well knew that no cry or excla- 
mation would, in such a moment of necessity, have been per- 
mitted to betray the accident. A few large drops of blood were 
trickling down the shoulder of the Sagamore, who, when he 
perceived that the eyes of Uncas dwelt too long on the sight, 
raised some water in the hollow of his hand, and, washing off 
the stain, was content to manifest in this simple manner the 
slightness of the injury. 

"Softly, softly, Major," said the scout, who by this time had 
reloaded his rifle; "we are a little too far already for a rifle to 
put forth its beauties, and you see yonder imps are holding a 
council. Let them come up within striking distance — ■ my eye 
may well be trusted in such a matter — and I will trail the 
varlets the length of the Horican, guaranteeing that not a shot 
of theirs shall, at the worst, more than break the skin, while 
Killdeer shall touch the life twice in three times." 

"We forget our errand," returned the diligent Duncan. 
"For God's sake let us profit by this advantage, and increase 
our distance from the enemy." 

"Give me my children," said Munro hoarsely; "trifle no 
longer with a father's agony, but restore me my babes." 

Long and habitual deference to the mandates of his superiors 
had taught the scout the virtue of obedience. Throwing a last 
and lingering glance at the distant canoes, he laid aside his 
rifle, and, relieving the wearied Duncan, resumed the paddle, 
which he wielded with sinews that never tired. His efforts were 
seconded by those of the Mohicans, and a very few minutes 
served to place such a sheet of water between them and their 
enemies that Heyward once more breathed freely. 

The lake now began to expand, and their route lay along a 
wide reach, that was lined, as before, by high and ragged 
mountains. But the islands were few, and easily avoided. The 
strokes of the paddles grew more measured and regular, while 



THE CHASE 129 

they who plied them continued their labor, after the close and 
deadly chase from which they had just relieved themselves, 
with as much coolness as though their speed had been tried in 
sport, rather than under such pressing, nay, almost desperate 
circumstances. 

Instead of following the western shore, whither their errand 
led them, the wary Mohican inclined his course more towards 
those hills behind which Montcalm was known to have led his 
army into the formidable fortress of Ticonderoga. As the 
Hurons, to every appearance, had abandoned the pursuit, 
there was no apparent reason for this excess of caution. It was, 
however, maintained for hours, until they had reached a bay, 
nigh the northern termination of the lake. Here the canoe was 
driven upon the beach, and the whole party landed. Hawkeye 
and Heyward ascended an adjacent bluff, where the former, 
after considering the expanse of water beneath him, pointed 
out to the latter a small black object, hovering under a head- 
land, at the distance of several miles. 

"Do you see it?" demanded the scout. "Now, what would 
you account that spot, were you left alone to white experience 
to find your way through this wilderness?" 

"But for its distance and its magnitude, I should suppose it 
a bird. Can it be a living object?" 

" 'T is a canoe of good birchen bark, and paddled by fierce 
and crafty Mingoes. Though Providence has lent to those who 
inhabit the woods eyes that would be needless to men in the 
settlements, where there are inventions to assist the sight, yet 
no human organs can see all the dangers which at this moment 
circumvent us. These varlets pretend to be bent chiefly on 
their sun-down meal, but the moment it is dark they will be on 
our trail, as true as hounds on the scent. We must throw them 
off, or our pursuit of Le Renard Subtil may be given up. These 
lakes are useful at times, especially when the game takes the 
water," continued the scout, gazing about him with a counte- 
nance of concern; "but they give no cover, except it be to the 
fishes. God knows what the country would be, if the settle- 
ments should ever spread far from the two rivers. Both hunt- 
ing and war would lose their beauty." 

"Let us not delay a moment, without some good and obvi- 
ous cause." 



130 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 

"I little like that smoke, which you may see worming up 
along the rock above the canoe/' interrupted the abstracted 
scout. "My life on it, other eyes than ours see it, and know its 
meaning. Well, words will not mend the matter, and it is time 
that we were doing." 

Hawkeye moved away from the lookout, and descended, 
musing profoundly, to the shore. He communicated the result 
of his observations to his companions, in Delaware, and a short 
and earnest consultation succeeded. When it terminated, the 
three instantly set about executing their new resolutions. 

The canoe was lifted from the water, and borne on the shoul- 
ders of the party. They proceeded into the wood, making as 
broad and obvious a trail as possible. They soon reached a 
water-course, which they crossed, and continued onward, 
until they came to an extensive and naked rock. At this point, 
where their footsteps might be expected to be no longer visible, 
they retraced their route to the brook, walking backwards, 
with the utmost care. They now followed the bed of the little 
stream to the lake, into which they immediately launched their 
canoe again. A low point concealed them from the headland, 
and the margin of the lake was fringed for some distance with 
dense and overhanging bushes. Under the cover of these nat- 
ural advantages, they toiled their way, with patient industry, 
until the scout pronounced that he believed it would be safe 
once more to land. 

The halt continued until evening rendered objects indistinct 
and uncertain to the eye. Then they resumed their route, and, 
favored by the darkness, pushed silently and vigorously to- 
wards the western shore. Although the rugged outline of 
mountain, to which they were steering, presented no distinc- 
tive marks to the eyes of Duncan, the Mohican entered the 
little haven he had selected with the confidence and accuracy 
of an experienced pilot. 

The boat was again lifted and borne into the woods, where it 
was carefully concealed under a pile of brush. The adventurers 
assumed their arms and packs, and the scout announced to 
Munro and Heyward that he and the Indians were at last in 
readiness to proceed. 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

THE POETIC PRINCIPLE 1 

In speaking of the Poetic Principle, I have no design to be 
either thorough or profound. While discussing very much at 
random the essentiality of what we call Poetry, my principal 
purpose will be to cite for consideration some few of those minor 
English or American poems which best suit my own taste, or 
which, upon my own fancy, have left the most definite im- 
pression. By "minor poems" I mean, of course, poems of little 
length. And here, in the beginning, permit me to say a few 
words in regard to a somewhat peculiar principle, which, 
whether rightfully or wrongfully, has always had its influence 
in my own critical estimate of the poem. I hold that a long 
poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, " a long poem," 
is simply a flat contradiction in terms. 

I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only 
inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the 
poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement. But all excite- 
ments are, through a psychal necessity, transient. That degree 
of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, 
cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great 
length. After the lapse of half an hour, at the very utmost, it 
flags — fails — a revulsion ensues — and then the poem is, in 
effect, and in fact, no longer such. 

There are, no doubt, many who have found difficulty in 
reconciling the critical dictum that the Paradise Lost is to be 
devoutly admired throughout, with the absolute impossibility 
of maintaining for it, during perusal, the amount of enthusiasm 
which that critical dictum would demand. This great work, in 
fact, is to be regarded as poetical only when, losing sight of 
that vital requisite in all works of Art, Unity, we view it merely 
as a series of minor poems. If, to preserve its Unity — its 
totality of effect or impression — we read it (as would be 
necessary) at a single sitting, the result is but a constant alter- 

1 Published in Sartain's Union Magazine, October, 1850. 



132 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

nation of excitement and depression. After a passage of what 
we feel to be true poetry, there follows, inevitably, a passage of 
platitude which no critical pre-judgment can force us to ad- 
mire; but if, upon completing the work, we read it again; 
omitting the first book — that is to say, commencing with the 
second — ■ we shall be surprised at now finding that admirable 
which we before condemned — that damnable which we had 
previously so much admired. It follows from all this that the 
ultimate, aggregate, or absolute effect of even the best epic 
under the sun, is a nullity — and this is precisely the fact. 

In regard to the Iliad, we have, if not positive proof, at least 
very good reason, for believing it intended as a series of lyrics ; 
but, granting the epic intention, I can say only that the work is 
based in an imperfect sense of Art. The modern epic is, of the 
suppositional ancient model, but an inconsiderate and blind- 
fold imitation. But the day of these artistic anomalies is over. 
If, at any time, any very long poem were popular in reality — 
which I doubt — it is at least clear that no very long poem will 
ever be popular again. 

That the extent of a poetical work is, ceteris paribus, the 
measure of its merit, seems undoubtedly, when we thus state it, 
a proposition sufficiently absurd — yet we are indebted for it to 
the quarterly Reviews. Surely there can be nothing in mere 
size, abstractly considered — there can be nothing in mere 
bulk, so far as a volume is concerned, which has so continuously 
elicited admiration from these saturnine pamphlets ! A moun- 
tain, to be sure, by the mere sentiment of physical magnitude 
which it conveys, does impress us with a sense of the sublime — 
but no man is impressed after this fashion by the material 
grandeur of even The Columbiad. 1 Even the Quarterlies have 
not instructed us to be so impressed by it. As yet, they have 
not insisted on our estimating Lamartine by the cubic foot, or 
Pollok 2 by the pound — but what else are we to infer from their 
continued prating about " sustained effort"? If, by "sustained 
effort," any little gentleman has accomplished an epic, let us 
frankly commend him for the effort — if this indeed be a thing 
commendable — but let us forbear praising the epic on the 
effort's account. It is to be hoped that common sense, in the 

1 An epic by Joel Barlow (i 754-181 2). 

2 Robert Pollok (1798-1827), a Scottish poet. 



THE POETIC PRINCIPLE 133 

time to come, will prefer deciding upon a work of art rather 
by the impression it makes, by the effect it produces, than by 
the time it took to impress the effect, or by the amount of 
" sustained effort" which had been found necessary in effecting 
the impression. The fact is, that perseverance is one thing and 
genius quite another — nor can all the Quarterlies in Christen- 
dom confound them. By and by, this proposition, with many 
which I have just been urging, will be received as self-evident. 
In the mean time, by being generally condemned as falsities, 
they will not be essentially damaged as truths. 

On the other hand, it is clear that a poem may be improperly 
brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. 
A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant 
or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring effect. There 
must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax. 
De Beranger has wrought innumerable things, pungent and 
spirit-stirring, but in general they have been too imponderous 
to stamp themselves deeply into the public attention, and thus, 
as so many feathers of fancy, have been blown aloft only to 
be whistled down the wind. 

A remarkable instance of the effect of undue brevity in 
depressing a poem — in keeping it out of the popular view — is 
afforded by the following exquisite little Serenade: 

"I arise from dreams of thee 

In the first sweet sleep of night, 
When the winds are breathing low, 

And the stars are shining bright; 
I arise from dreams of thee, 

And a spirit in my feet 
Has led me — who knows how? — 

To thy chamber- window, sweet! 

"The wandering airs, they faint 

On the dark, the silent stream — 
The champak odors fail 

Like sweet thoughts in a dream; 
The nightingale's complaint, 

It dies upon her heart, 
As I must die on thine, 

O, beloved as thou art! 

"O, lift me from the grass! 
I die, I faint, I fail! 



i 3 4 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

Let thy love in kisses rain 

On my lips and eyelids pale. 
My cheek is cold and white, alas! 

My heart beats loud and fast : 
Oh! press it close to thine again, 

Where it will break at last!" 

Very few perhaps are familiar with these lines — yet no less 
a poet than Shelley is their author. Their warm, yet delicate 
and ethereal imagination will be appreciated by all — but by 
none so thoroughly as by him who has himself arisen from 
sweet dreams of one beloved to bathe in the aromatic air of a 
southern midsummer night. 

One of the finest poems by Willis, 1 the very best in my opin- 
ion which he has ever written, has no doubt, through this same 
defect of undue brevity, been kept back from its proper posi- 
tion, not less in the critical than in the popular view. 

"The shadows lay along Broadway, 

'T was near the twilight-tide — 
And slowly there a lady fair 

Was walking in her pride. 
Alone walk'd she; but, viewlessly, 

Walk'd spirits at her side. 

"Peace charm'd the street beneath her feet, 

And Honor charm'd the air; 
And all astir looked kind on her, 

And called her good as fair — 
For all God ever gave to her 

She kept with chary care. 

" She kept with care her beauties rare 

From lovers warm and true — 
Her heart was cold to all but gold, 

And the rich came not to woo — 
But honor'd well are charms to sell, 

If priests the selling do. 

"Now walking there was one more fair — 
A slight girl, lily-pale; 
And she had unseen company 
To make the spirit quail — 
'Twixt Want and Scorn she walk'd forlorn, 
And nothing could avail. 

1 Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-1867), an American poet. 



THE POETIC PRINCIPLE 135 

"No mercy now can clear her brow 

From this world's peace to pray, 
For as love's wild prayer dissolved in air, 

Her woman's heart gave way! — 
But the sin forgiven by Christ in Heaven 

By man is cursed alway!" 

In this composition we find it difficult to recognize the Willis 
who has written so many mere "verses of society." The lines 
are not only richly ideal, but full of energy, while they breathe 
an earnestness, an evident sincerity of sentiment, for which we 
look in vain throughout all the other works of this author. 

While the epic mania — while the idea that, to merit in 
poetry, prolixity is indispensable — has for some years past 
been gradually dying out of the public mind by mere dint of 
its own absurdity, we find it succeeded by a heresy too palpably 
false to be long tolerated, but one which, in the brief period it 
has already endured, may be said to have accomplished more 
in the corruption of our Poetical Literature than all its other 
enemies combined. I allude to the heresy of The Didactic. It 
has been assumed, tacitly and avowedly, directly and indi- 
rectly, that the ultimate object of all Poetry is Truth. Every 
poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral, and by this moral is 
the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. We Americans 
especially have patronized this happy idea, and we Bostonians 
very especially have developed it in full. We have taken it 
into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's sake, 
and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to 
confess ourselves radically wanting in the true Poetic dignity 
and force: — but the simple fact is, that would we but permit 
ourselves to look into our own souls, we should immediately 
there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can 
exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely 
noble than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which 
is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the 
poem's sake. 

With as deep a reverence for the True as ever inspired the 
bosom of man, I would nevertheless limit, in some measure, its 
modes of inculcation. I would limit to enforce them. I would 
not enfeeble them by dissipation. The demands of Truth are 
severe. She has no sympathy with the myrtles. All that which 



136 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

is so indispensable in Song is precisely all that with which she 
has nothing whatever to do. It is but making her a flaunting 
paradox to wreathe her in gems and flowers. In enforcing a 
truth, we need severity rather than efflorescence of language. 
We must be simple, precise, terse. We must be cool, calm, un- 
impassioned. In a word, we must be in that mood which, as 
nearly as possible, is the exact converse of the poetical. He 
must be blind indeed who does not perceive the radical and 
chasmal differences between the truthful and the poetical 
modes of inculcation. He must be theory-mad beyond redemp- 
tion who, in spite of these differences, shall still persist in 
attempting to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry 
,-and Truth. 

Dividing the world of mind into its three most immediately 
obvious distinctions, we have the Pure Intellect, Taste, and 
the Moral Sense. I place Taste in the middle because it is just 
this position which it occupies in the mind. It holds intimate 
relations with either extreme, but from the Moral Sense is 
separated by so faint a difference that Aristotle has not hesi- 
tated to place some of its operations among the virtues them- 
selves. Nevertheless, we find the offices of the trio marked with 
a sufficient distinction. Just as the Intellect concerns itself 
with Truth, so Taste informs us of the Beautiful, while the 
Moral Sense is regardful of Duty. Of this latter, while Con- 
science teaches the obligation, and Reason the expediency, 
Taste contents herself with displaying the charms, waging war 
upon Vice solely on the ground of her deformity, her dispro- 
portion, her animosity to the fitting, to the appropriate, to the 
harmonious, in a word, to Beauty. 

An immortal instinct deep within the spirit of man is thus 
plainly a sense of the Beautiful. This it is which administers 
to his delight in the manifold forms, and sounds, and odors 
and sentiments, amid which he exists. And just as the lily is 
repeated in the lake, or the eyes of Amaryllis in the mirror, so 
is the mere oral or written repetition of these forms, and sounds 
and colors, and odors, and sentiments, a duplicate source of 
delight. But this mere repetition is not poetry. He who shall 
simply sing, with however glowing enthusiasm, or with how- 
ever vivid a truth of description, of the sights, and sounds, and 
odors, and colors, and sentiments, which greet him in common 



THE POETIC PRINCIPLE 137 

with all mankind — he, I say, has yet failed to prove his divine 
title. There is still a something in the distance which he has 
been unable to attain. We have still a thirst unquenchable, 
to allay which he has not shown us the crystal springs. This 
thirst belongs to the immortality of Man. It is at once a conse- 
quence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is the 
desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of 
the Beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the Beauty 
above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories be- 
yond the grave, we struggle by multiform combinations among 
the things and thoughts of Time to attain a portion of that 
Loveliness whose very elements perhaps appertain to eternity 
alone. And thus when by Poetry — or when by Music, the 
most entrancing of the Poetic moods — we find ourselves 
melted into tears, we weep then — not as the Abbate Gravina 1 
supposes — through excess of pleasure, but through a certain, 
petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, 
wholly, here on earth, at once and forever, those divine and 
rapturous joys, of which through the poem or through the music, 
we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses. 

The struggle to apprehend the supernal Loveliness — this 
struggle, on the part of souls fittingly constituted — has given 
to the world all that which it (the world) has ever been enabled 
at once to understand and to feel as poetic. 

The Poetic Sentiment, of course, may develop itself in vari- 
ous'modes — in Painting, in Sculpture, in Architecture, in the 
Dance — very especially in Music — and very peculiarly, and 
with a wide field, in the composition of the Landscape Garden. 
Our present theme, however, has regard only to its manifesta- 
tion in words. And here let me speak briefly on the topic of 
rhythm. Contenting myself with the certainty that Music, in 
its various modes of metre, rhythm, and rhyme, is of so vast a 
moment in Poetry as never to be wisely rejected — is so vitally 
important an adjunct — that he is simply silly who declines 
its assistance, I will not now pause to maintain its absolute 
essentiality. It is in Music perhaps that the soul most nearly 
attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic 
Sentiment, it struggles — the creation of supernal Beauty. It 
may be, indeed, that here this sublime end is, now and then, 
1 Domenico da Gravina (d. ca. 1350), Neapolitan historian. 



138 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

attained in fact. We are often made to feel, with a shivering 
delight, that from an earthly harp are stricken notes which 
cannot have been unfamiliar to the angels. And thus there can 
be little doubt that in the union of Poetry with Music in its 
popular sense, we shall find the widest field for the Poetic 
development. The old Bards and Minnesingers had advan- 
tages which we do not possess — and Thomas Moore, singing 
his own songs, was, in the most legitimate manner, perfecting 
them as poems. 

To recapitulate, then: — I would define, in brief, the Poetry 
of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter 
is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience, it has only 
collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern 
whatever either with Duty or with Truth. 

A few words, however, in explanation. That pleasure which 
is at once the most pure, the most elevating, and the most in- 
tense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the 
Beautiful. In the contemplation of Beauty we alone find it 
possible to attain that pleasurable elevation, or excitement of 
the soul, which we recognize as the Poetic Sentiment, and which 
is so easily distinguished from Truth, which is the satisfaction 
of the Reason, or from Passion, which is the excitement of the 
heart. I make Beauty, therefore, — using the word as inclu- 
sive of the sublime, — I make Beauty the province of the 
poem, simply because it is an obvious rule of Art that effects 
should be made to spring as directly as possible from their 
causes : — no one as yet having been weak enough to deny that 
the peculiar elevation in question is at least most readily attain- 
able in the poem. It by no means follows, however, that the 
incitements of Passion, or the precepts of Duty, or even the 
lessons of Truth, may not be introduced into a poem, and with 
advantage; for they may subserve incidentally, in various 
ways, the general purposes of the work: — but the true artist 
will always contrive to tone them down in proper subjection to 
that Beauty which is the atmosphere and the real essence of 
the poem. 

I cannot better introduce the few poems which I shall pre- 
sent for your consideration, than by the citation of the Proem 
to Mr. Longfellow's "Waif": 



THE POETIC PRINCIPLE i 39 

"The day is done, and the darkness 
Falls from the wings of Night, 
As a feather is wafted downward 
From an eagle in his flight. 

"I see the lights of the village 

Gleam through the rain and the mist, 
And a feeling of sadness comes o'er me, 
That my soul cannot resist: 

"A feeling of sadness and longing, 
That is not akin to pain, 
And resembles sorrow only 
As the mist resembles the rain. 

" Come, read to me some poem, 
Some simple and heartfelt lay, 
That shall soothe this restless feeling, 
And banish the thoughts of day. 

"Not from the grand old masters, 
Not from the bards sublime, 
Whose distant footsteps echo 
Through the corridors of Time. 

"For, like strains of martial music, 
Their mighty thoughts suggest 
Life's endless toil and endeavor; 
And to-night I long for rest. 

"Read from some humbler poet, 

Whose songs gushed from his heart, 
As showers, from the clouds of summer, 
Or tears from the eyelids start; 

"Who through long days of labor, 
And nights devoid of ease, 
Still heard in his soul the music 
Of wonderful melodies. 

"Such songs have power to quiet 

The restless pulse of care, 

And come like the benediction 

That follows after prayer. 

"Then read from the treasured volume 
The poem of thy choice, 
And lend to the rhyme of the poet 
The beauty of thy voice. 



140 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

"And the night shall be filled with music, 
And the cares, that infest the day, 
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, 
And as silently steal away." 

With no great range of imagination, these lines have been 
justly admired for their delicacy of expression. Some of the 
images are very effective. Nothing can be better than 

"The bards sublime 
Whose distant footsteps echo 
Down 1 the corridors of Time." 

The idea of the last quatrain is also very effective. The poem 
on the whole, however, is chiefly to be admired for the graceful 
insouciance of its metre, so well in accordance with the charac- 
ter of the sentiments, and especially for the ease of the general 
manner. This "ease" or naturalness, in a literary style, it has 
long been the fashion to regard as ease in appearance alone — 
as a point of really difficult attainment. But not so: a natural 
manner is difficult only to him who should never meddle with 
it — to the unnatural. It is but the result of writing with the 
understanding, or with the instinct, that the tone, in composi- 
tion, should always be that which the mass of mankind would 
adopt — and must perpetually vary, of course, with the occa- 
sion. The author who, after the fashion of the North American 
Review, should be upon all occasions merely "quiet," must 
necessarily upon many occasions, be simply silly, or stupid; 
and has no more right to be considered "easy" or "natural" 
than a Cockney exquisite, or than the sleeping Beauty in the 
wax- works. 

Among the minor poems of Bryant, none has so much im- 
pressed me as the one which he entitles "June." I quote only 
a portion of it: 

"There, through the long, long summer hours, 

The golden light should lie, 
And thick young herbs and groups of flowers 

Stand in their beauty by. 
The oriole should build and tell 
His love-tale, close beside my cell; 

The idle butterfly 
Should rest him there, and there be heard 
The housewife-bee and humming bird. 

1 Sic. 



THE POETIC PRINCIPLE 141 

"And what if cheerful shouts at noon 

Come, from the village sent, 
Or songs of maids, beneath the moon, 

With fairy laughter blent? 
And what if, in the evening light, 
Betrothed lovers walk in sight 

Of my low monument? 
I would the lovely scene around 
Might know no sadder sight nor sound. 

"I know, I know I should not see * 

The season's glorious show, 
Nor would its brightness shine for me, 

Nor its wild music flow; 
But if, around my place of sleep, 
The friends I love should come to weep, 

They might not haste to go. 
Soft airs, and song, and light and bloom 
Should keep them lingering by my tomb. 

"These to their soften'd hearts should bear 

The thought of what has been, 
And speak of one who cannot share 

The gladness of the scene; 
Whose part in all the pomp that fills 
The circuit of the summer hills, 

Is — that his grave is green; 
And deeply would their hearts rejoice 
To hear again his living voice." 

The rhythmical flow here is even voluptuous — nothing 
could be more melodious. The poem has always affected me in 
a remarkable manner. The intense melancholy which seems to 
well up, perforce, to the surface of all the poet's cheerful say- 
ings about his grave, we find thrilling us to the soul — while 
there is the truest poetic elevation in the thrill. The impression 
left is one of a pleasurable sadness. And if, in the remaining 
compositions which I shall introduce to you, there be more or 
less of a similar tone always apparent, let me remind you that 
(how or why we know not) this certain taint of sadness is in- 
separably connected with all the higher manifestations of true 
Beauty. It is, nevertheless, 

"A feeling of sadness and longing 
That is not akin to pain, 

1 Sic. 



i 4 2 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

And resembles sorrow only 
As the mist resembles the rain." 

The taint of which I speak is clearly perceptible even in a 
poem so full of brilliancy and spirit as the "Health" of 
Edward Coate Pinkney: 1 

"I fill this cup to one made up 

Of loveliness alone, 
A woman, of her gentle sex 

The seeming paragon; 
To whom the better elements 

And kindly stars have given 
A form so fair, that, like the air, 

'T is less of earth than heaven. 

"Her every tone is music's own, 

Like those of morning birds, 
And something more than melody 

Dwells ever in her words; 
The coinage of her heart are they, 

And from her lips each flows 
As one may see the burden'd bee 

Forth issue from the rose. 

"Affections are as thoughts to her, 

The measures of her hours; ' 
Her feelings have the fragrancy, 

The freshness of young flowers; 
And lovely passions, changing oft, 

So fill her, she appears 
The image of themselves by turns, — 

The idol of past years! 

" Of her bright face one glance will trace 

A picture on the brain, 
And of her voice in echoing hearts 

A sound must long remain; 
But memory, such as mine of her, 

So very much endears, 
When death is nigh my latest sigh 

Will not be life's but hers. 

" I fill this cup to one made up 
Of loveliness alone, 
A woman, of her gentle sex 
The seeming paragon — 

1 (1802-1828), a Southern poet. 



THE POETIC PRINCIPLE 143 

Her health! and would on earth there stood 

Some more of such a frame, 
That life might be all poetry, 

And weariness a name." 

It was the misfortune of Mr. Pinkney to have been born too 
far south. Had he been a New Englander, it is probable that 
he would have been ranked as the first of American lyrists, by 
that magnanimous cabal which has so long controlled the 
destinies of American Letters, in conducting the thing called 
the North American Review. The poem just cited is especially 
beautiful; but the poetic elevation which it induces, we must 
refer chiefly to our sympathy in the poet's enthusiasm. We par- 
don his hyperboles for the evident earnestness with which they 
are uttered. 

It was by no means my design, however, to expatiate upon 
the merits of what I should read you. These will necessarily 
speak for themselves. Boccalini, in his Advertisements from 
Parnassus, tells us that Zoilus once presented Apollo a very 
caustic criticism upon a very admirable book : — whereupon 
the god asked him for the beauties of the work. He replied that 
he only busied himself about the errors. On hearing this, 
Apollo, handing him a sack of unwinnowed wheat, bade him 
pick out all the chaff for his reward. 

Now this fable answers very well as a hit at the critics — but 
I am by no means sure that the god was in the right. I am by 
no means certain that the true limits of the critical duty are 
not grossly misunderstood. Excellence, in a poem especially, 
may be considered in the light of an axiom, which need only be 
properly put, to become self-evident. It is not excellence if it 
require to be demonstrated as such : — and thus to point out 
too particularly the merits of a work of Art, is to admit that 
they are not merits altogether. 

Among the "Melodies" of Thomas Moore is one whose dis- 
tinguished character as a poem proper seems to have been 
singularly left out of view. I allude to his lines beginning — 
"Come, rest in this bosom." The intense energy of their ex- 
pression is not surpassed by anything in Byron. There are two 
of the lines in which a sentiment is conveyed that embodies 
the all in all of the divine passion of Love — a sentiment which, 
perhaps, has found its echo in more, and in more passionate, 



144 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

human hearts than any other single sentiment ever embodied 
in words: 

"Come, rest in this bosom, my own stricken deer, 
Though the herd have fled from thee, thy home is still here; 
Here still is the smile, that no cloud can o'ercast, 
And a heart and a hand all thy own to the last. 

"Oh! what was love made for, if 't is not the same 
Through joy and through torment, through glory and shame? 
I know not, I ask not, if guilt 's in that heart, 
I but know that I love thee, whatever thou art. 

"Thou hast call'd me thy Angel in moments of bliss, 
And thy Angel I '11 be, 'mid the horrors of this, — 
Through the furnace, unshrinking, thy steps to pursue, 
And shield thee, and save thee, — or perish there too!" 

It has been the fashion of late days to deny Moore imagina- 
tion, while granting him fancy — a distinction originating with 
Coleridge — than whom no man more fully comprehended the 
great powers of Moore. The fact is, that the fancy of this poet 
so far predominates over all his other faculties, and over the 
fancy of all other men, as to have induced, very naturally, 
the idea that he is fanciful only. But never was there a greater 
mistake. Never was a grosser wrong done the fame of a true 
poet. In the compass of the English language I can call to 
mind no poem more profoundly — more weirdly imaginative, 
in the best sense, than the lines commencing — "I would I 
were by that dim lake" — which are the composition of 
Thomas Moore. I regret that I am unable to remember them. 
One of the noblest — and, speaking of fancy, one of the most 
singularly fanciful of modern poets, was Thomas Hood. His 
"Fair Ines" had always for me an inexpressible charm: 

"0 saw ye not fair Ines? 

She's gone into the West, 
To dazzle when the sun is down, 

And rob the world of rest: 
She took our daylight with her, 

The smiles that we love best, 
With morning blushes on her cheek, 

And pearls upon her breast. 

"0 turn again, far Ines, 
Before the fall of night, 



THE POETIC PRINCIPLE 145 

For fear the Moon should shine alone, 

And stars unrivall'd bright; 
And blessed will the lover be 

That walks beneath their light, 
And breathes the love against thy cheek 

I dare not even write! 

"Would I had been, fair Ines, 

That gallant cavalier, 
Who rode so gaily by thy side, 

And whisper 'd thee so near! 
Were there no bonny dames at home, 

Or no true lovers here, 
That he should cross the seas to win 

The dearest of the dear? 

"I saw thee, lovely Ines, 

Descend along the shore, 
With bands of noble gentlemen, 

And banners wav'd before; 
And gentle youth and maidens gay, ' 

And snowy plumes they wore; 
It would have been a beauteous dream, 

If it had been no more! 

"Alas, alas, fair Ines, 

She went away with song, 
With Music waiting on her steps, 

And shoutings of the throng; 
But some were sad, and felt no mirth, 

But only Music's wrong, 
In sounds that sang Farewell, Farewell, 

To her you've loved so long. 

'Farewell, farewell, fair Ines, 

That vessel never bore 
So fair a lady on its deck, 

Nor danced so light before, — 
Alas for pleasure on the sea, 

And sorrow on the shore! 
The smile that blest one lover's heart 

Has broken many more!" 

"The Haunted House," by the same author, is one of the 
truest poems ever written, one of the truest, one of the most 
unexceptionable, one of the most thoroughly artistic, both in its 
theme and in its execution. It is, moreover, powerfully ideal — 



146 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

imaginative. I regret that its length renders it unsuitable for 
the purposes of this Lecture. In place of it, permit me to offer 
the universally appreciated "Bridge of Sighs": 

"One more Unfortunate, 
Weary of breath, 
Rashly importunate, 
Gone to her death! 
Take her up tenderly, 
Lift her with care; — 
Fashion'd so slenderly, 
Young, and so fair! 

"Look at her garments 
Clinging like cerements; 
Whilst the wave constantly 
Drips from her clothing; 
Take her up instantly, 
Loving, not loathing. 

' "Touch her not scornfully; 
Think of her mournfully, 
Gently and humanly; 
Not of the stains of her, 
All that remains of her 
Now is pure womanly. 

"Make no deep scrutiny 
Into her mutiny 
Rash and undutiful; 
Past all dishonor, 
Death has left on her 
Only the beautiful. 

"Still, for all slips of hers, 
One of Eve's family — 
Wipe those poor lips of hers 
Oozing so clammily. 
Loop up her tresses 
Escaped from the comb, 
Her fair auburn tresses; 
Whilst wonderment guesses 
Where was her home? 

"Who was her father? 
Who was her mother? 
Had she a sister? 
Had she a brother? 



THE POETIC PRINCIPLE i 47 



Or was there a dearer one 
Still, and a nearer one 
Yet, than all other? 

"Alas! for the rarity 
Of Christian charity 
Under the sun! 
Oh! it was pitiful! 
Near a whole city full 
Home she had none. 

"Sisterly, brotherly, 
Fatherly, motherly 
Feelings had changed: 
Love, by harsh evidence, 
Thrown from its eminence; 
Even God's providence 
Seeming estranged. 

"Where the lamps quiver 
So far in the river, 
With many a light 
From window and casement, 
From garret to basement, 
She stood, with amazement, 
Houseless by night. 

"The bleak wind of March 
Made her tremble and shiver; 
But not the dark arch, 
Or the black flowing river: 
Mad from life's history, 
Glad to death's mystery, 
Swift to be hurl'd — 
Anywhere, anywhere 
Out of the world! 

"In she plunged boldly, 
No matter how coldly 
The rough river ran — 
Over the brink of it, 
Picture it, — think of it, 
Dissolute Man! 
Lave in it, drink of it 
Then, if you can! 

"Take her up tenderly 
Lift her with care 



i 4 8 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

Fashion'd so slenderly, 
Young, and so fair! 
Ere her limbs frigidly 
Stiffen too rigidly, 
Decently, — kindly, — 
Smooth, and compose them; 
And her eyes, close them, 
Staring so blindly! 

"Dreadfully staring 
Through muddy impurity, 
As when with the daring 
Last look of despairing 
Fixed on futurity. 
Perishing gloomily, 
Spurred by contumely, 
Cold inhumanity, 
Burning insanity, 
Into her rest, — 
Cross her hands humbly, 
As if praying dumbly, 
Over her breast! 
Owning her weakness, 
Her evil behavior, 
And leaving, with meekness, 
Her sins to her Savior!" 

The vigor of this poem is no less remarkable than its pathos. 
The versification, although carrying the fanciful to the very 
verge of the fantastic, is nevertheless admirably adapted to 
the wild insanity which is the thesis of the poem. 

Among the minor poems of Lord Byron is one which has 
never received from the critics the praise which it undoubtedly 
deserves : 

"Though the day of my destiny's over, 

And the star of my fate hath declined, 
Thy soft heart refused to discover 

The faults which so many could find; 
Though thy soul with my grief was acquainted, 

It shrunk not to share it with me, 
And the love which my spirit hath painted 

It never hath found but in thee. 

"Then when nature around me is smiling, 
The last smile which answers to mine, 



THE POETIC PRINCIPLE 149 

I do not believe it beguiling, 

Because it reminds me of thine; 
And when winds are at war with the ocean, 

As the breasts I believed in with me, 
If their billows excite an emotion, 

It is that they bear me from thee. 

"Though the rock of my last hope is shivered, 

And its fragments are sunk in the wave, 
Though I feel that my soul is delivered 

To pain — it shall not be its slave. 
There is many a pang to pursue me: 

They may crush, but they shall not contemn — 
They may torture, but shall not subdue me — 

T is of thee that I think — not of them. 

"Though human, thou didst not deceive me, 

Though woman, thou didst not forsake, 
Though loved, thou forborest to grieve me, 

Though slandered, thou never couldst shake, — 
Though trusted, thou didst not disclaim me, 

Though parted, it was not to fly, 
Though watchful, 't was not to defame me, 

Nor mute, that the world might belie. 

"Yet I blame not the world, nor despise it, 

Nor the war of the many with one — 
If my soul was not fitted to prize it, 

'T was folly not sooner to shun: 
And if dearly that error hath cost me, 

And more than I once could foresee, 
I have found that whatever it lost me, 

It could not deprive me of thee. 

"From the wreck of the past, which hath perished, 

Thus much I at least may recall, 
It hath taught me that which I most cherished, 

Deserved to be dearest of all: 
In the desert a fountain is springing, 

In the wide waste there still is a tree, 
And a bird in the solitude singing, . 

Which speaks to my spirit of thee." 

Although the rhythm here is one of the most difficult, the 
versification could scarcely be improved. No nobler theme ever 
engaged the pen of poet. It is the soul-elevating idea that no 
man can consider himself entitled to complain of Fate while, in 
his adversity, he still retains the unwavering love of woman. 



ISO EDGAR ALLAN POE 

From Alfred Tennyson — although in perfect sincerity I 
regard him as the noblest poet that ever lived — I have left 
myself time to cite only a very brief specimen. I call him, and 
think him the noblest of poets — not because the impressions 
he produces are at all times the most profound -=- not because 
the poetical excitement which he induces is at all times the 
most intense — but because it is at all times the most ethereal 
— in other words, the most elevating and most pure. No poet 
is so little of the earth, earthy. What I am about to read is from 
his last long poem, The Princess: 

"Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, 
Tears from the depth of some divine despair 
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, 
In looking on the happy Autumn fields, 
And thinking of the days that are no more. 

"Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail 
That brings our friends up from the underworld, 
Sad as the last which reddens over one 
That sinks with all we love below the verge; 
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more. 

"Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns 
The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds 
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes 
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square; 
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more. 

"Dear as remember'd kisses after death, 
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd 
On lips that are for others; deep as love, 
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret; 
O Death in Life, the days that are no more." 

Thus, although in a very cursory and imperfect manner, I 
have endeavored to convey to you my conception of the Poetic 
Principle. It has -been my purpose to suggest that, while this 
Principle itself is strictly and simply the Human Aspiration 
for Supernal Beauty, the manifestation of the Principle is 
always found in an elevating excitement of the Soul, quite inde- 
pendent of that passion which is the intoxication of the Heart, 
or of that truth which is the satisfaction of the Reason. For in 
regard to Passion, alas! its tendency is to degrade rather than 



THE POETIC PRINCIPLE 151 

to elevate the Soul. Love, on the contrary — Love — the true, 
the divine Eros — the Uranian as distinguished from the 
Dionaean Venus * — is unquestionably the purest and truest of 
all poetical themes. And in regard to Truth — if, to be sure, 
through the attainment of a truth we are led to perceive a har- 
mony where none was apparent before, we experience at once 
the true poetical effect — but this effect is referable to the har- 
mony alone, and not in the least degree to the truth which 
merely served to render the harmony manifest. 

We shall reach, however, more immediately a distinct con- 
ception of what the true Poetry is, by mere reference to a few 
of the simple elements which induce in the Poet himself the 
true poetical effect. He recognizes the ambrosia which nour- 
ishes his soul in the bright orbs that shine in Heaven — in the 
volutes of the flower — in the clustering of low shrubberies — 
in the waving of the grain-fields — in the slanting of tall Eastern 
trees — in the blue distance of mountains — in the grouping 
of clouds — in the twinkling of half -hidden brooks — in the 
gleaming of silver rivers — in the repose of sequestered lakes 
— in the star-mirroring depths of lonely wells. He perceives 
it in the songs of birds — in the harp of ^Eolus — in the sighing 
of the night-wind — in the repining voice of the forest — in 
the surf that complains to the shore — in the fresh breath of 
the woods — in the scent of the violet — in the voluptuous per- 
fume of the hyacinth — in the suggestive odor that comes to 
him at eventide from far-distant, undiscovered islands, over 
dim oceans, illimitable and unexplored. He owns it in all noble 
thoughts — in all unworldly motives — in all holy impulses — 
in all chivalrous, generous, and self-sacrificing deeds. He feels 
it in the beauty of woman — in the grace of her step — in the 
lustre of her eye — in the melody of her voice — in her soft 
laughter — in her sigh — in the harmony of the rustling of her 
robes. He deeply feels it in her winning endearments — in her 
burning enthusiasms — in her gentle charities — in her meek 
and devotional endurances — but above all — ah, far above 
all — he kneels to it, he worships it in the faith, in the purity, 
in the strength, in the altogether divine majesty — of her love. 

1 According to one tradition, Venus was the daughter of Jupiter and Dione; 
according to the prevalent tradition, she sprang from the foam of the sea, near 
Cyprus. 



152 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

Let me conclude by the recitation of yet another brief poem 
— one very different in character from any that I have before 
quoted. It is by Motherwell, 1 and is called "The Song of the 
Cavalier." With our modern and altogether rational ideas of 
the absurdity and impiety of warfare, we are not precisely in 
that frame of mind best adapted to sympathize with the senti- 
ments, and thus to appreciate the real excellence of the poem. 
To do this fully we must identify ourselves in fancy with the 
soul of the old cavalier. 

"Then mounte! then mounte, brave gallants, all, 

And don your helmes amaine: 
Deathe's couriers, Fame and Honor, call 

Us to the field againe. 
No shrewish teares shall fill our eye 

When the sword-hilt's in our hand, — 
Heart-whole we'll part, and no whit sighe 

For the fayrest of the land; 
Let piping swaine, and craven wight, 

Thus weepe and puling crye, 
Our business is like men to fight, 

And hero-like to die!" 



HAWTHORNE'S TWICE-TOLD TALES 2 

We said a few hurried words about Mr. Hawthorne in our 
last number, with the design of speaking more fully in the 
present. We are still, however, pressed for room, and must 
necessarily discuss his volumes more briefly and more at ran- 
dom than their high merits deserve. 

The book professes to be a collection of tales, yet is, in two 
respects, misnamed. These pieces are now in their third repub- 
lication, and, of course, are thrice-told. Moreover, they are 
by no means all tales, either in the ordinary or in the legitimate 
understanding of the term. Many of them are pure essays; for 
example, "Sights from a Steeple," "Sunday at Home," "Little 
Annie's Ramble," "A Rill from the Town Pump," "The Toll- 
Gatherer's Day," "The Haunted Mind," "The Sister Years," 
"Snow-Flakes," "Night Sketches," and "Foot-Prints on the 
Sea-Shore." We mention these matters chiefly on account of 

1 William Motherwell (1797-1835), a Scottish poet. 

2 Published in Graham's Magazine, May, 1842. 



HAWTHORNE'S TWICE-TOLD TALES 153 

their discrepancy with that marked precision and finish by 
which the body of the work is distinguished. 

Of the essays just named, we must be content to speak in 
brief. They are each and all beautiful, without being charac- 
terized by the polish and adaptation so visible in the tales 
proper. A painter would at once note their leading or predom- 
inant feature, and style it repose. There is no attempt at effect. 
All is quiet, thoughtful, subdued. Yet this repose may exist 
simultaneously with high originality of thought; and Mr. 
Hawthorne has demonstrated the fact. At every turn we meet 
with novel combinations ; yet these combinations never surpass 
the limits of the quiet. We are soothed as we read ; and withal 
is a calm astonishment that ideas so apparently obvious have 
never occurred or been presented to us before. Herein our 
author differs materially from Lamb or Hunt or Hazlitt — 
who, with vivid originality of manner and expression, have less 
of the true novelty of thought than is generally supposed, and 
whose originality, at best, has an uneasy and meretricious 
quaintness, replete with startling effects unfounded in nature, 
and inducing trains of reflection which lead to no satisfactory 
result. The Essays of Hawthorne have much of the character 
of Irving, with more of originality, and less of finish; while, 
compared with the Spectator, they have a vast superiority at 
all points. The Spectator, Mr. Irving, and Mr. Hawthorne 
have in common that tranquil and subdued manner which we 
have chosen to denominate repose; but, in the case of the two 
former, this repose is attained rather by the absence of novel 
combination, or of originality, than otherwise, and consists 
chiefly in the calm, quiet, unostentatious expression of com- 
monplace thoughts, in an unambitious, unadulterated Saxon. 
In them, by strong effort, we are made to conceive the absence 
of all. In the essays before us the absence of effort is too obvi- 
ous to be mistaken, and a strong undercurrent of suggestion 
runs continuously beneath the upper stream of the tranquil 
thesis. In short, these effusions of Mr. Hawthorne are the prod- 
uct of a truly imaginative intellect, restrained, and in some 
measure repressed, by fastidiousness of taste, by constitutional 
melancholy, and by indolence. 

But it is of his tales that we desire principally to speak. The 
tale proper, in our opinion, affords unquestionably the fairest 



154 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

field for the exercise of the loftiest talent, which can be 
afforded by the wide domains of mere prose. Were we bidden 
to say how the highest genius could be most advantageously 
employed for the best display of its own powers, we should 
answer, without hesitation — in the composition of a rhymed 
poem, not to exceed in length what might be perused in an 
hour. Within this limit alone can the highest order of true 
poetry exist. We need only here say, upon this topic, that, in 
almost all classes of composition, the unity of effect or impres- 
sion is a point of the greatest importance. It is clear, moreover, 
that this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions 
whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting. We may 
continue the reading of a prose composition, from the very 
nature of prose itself, much longer than we can persevere, to 
any good purpose, in the perusal of a poem. This latter, if 
truly^fulfilling the demands of the poetic sentiment, induces 
an exaltation of the soul which cannot be long sustained. All 
high excitements are necessarily transient. Thus a long poem 
is a paradox. And, without unity of impression, the deepest 
effects cannot be brought about. Epics were the offspring of 
an imperfect sense of Art, and their reign is no more. A poem 
too brief may produce a vivid, but never an intense' or enduring 
impression. Without a certain continuity of effort — without 
a certain duration or repetition of purpose — the soul is never 
deeply moved. There must be the dropping of the water upon 
the rock. De Beranger has wrought brilliant things — pungent 
and spirit-stirring — but, like all immassive bodies, they lack 
momentum, and thus fail to satisfy the Poetic Sentiment. They 
sparkle and excite, but, from want of continuity, fail deeply to 
impress. Extreme brevity will degenerate into epigrammatism; 
but the sin of extreme length is even more unpardonable. In 
medio tutissimus ibis. 1 

Were we called upon, however, to designate that class of 
composition which, next to such a poem as we have suggested 
should best fulfil the demands of high genius — should offer it 
the most advantageous field of exertion — we should unhesi- 
tatingly speak of the prose tale, as Mr. Hawthorne has here 
exemplified it. We allude to the short prose narrative, requir- 
ing from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal. The 
1 "You will go most safely in the middle." (Ovid.) 



HAWTHORNE'S TWICE-TOLD TALES 155 

ordinary novel is objectionable, from its length, for reasons 
already stated in substance. As it cannot be read at one sitting, 
it deprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from 
totality. Worldly interests intervening during the pauses of 
perusal, modify, annul, or counteract, in a greater or less 
degree, the impressions of the book. But simple cessation in 
reading would, of itself, be sufficient to destroy the true unity. 
In the brief tale, however, the author is enabled to carry out 
the fulness of his intention, be it what it may.* During the hour 
of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer's control. There 
are no external or extrinsic influences — resulting from weari- 
ness or interruption. 

A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he 
has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; 
but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or 
single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents 
— he then combines such events as may best aid him in estab- 
lishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend 
not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his 
first step. In the whole composition there should be no word 
written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the 
one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care 
and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the 
mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of 
the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented 
unblemished, because undisturbed; and this is an end unattain- 
able by the novel. Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here 
as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided. 

We have said that the tale has a point of superiority even 
over the poem. In fact, while the rhythm of this latter is an 
essential aid in the development of the poem's highest idea — 
the idea of the Beautiful — the artificialities of this rhythm are 
an inseparable bar to the development of all points of thought 
or expression which have their basis in Truth. But Truth is 
often, and in very great degree, the aim of the tale. Some of 
the finest tales are tales of ratiocination. Thus the field of this 
species of composition, if not in so elevated a region on the 
mountain of Mind, is a table-land of far vaster extent than the 
domain of the mere poem. Its products are never so rich, but 
infinitely more numerous, and more appreciable by the mass 



156 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

of mankind. The writer of the prose tale, in short, may bring 
to his theme a vast variety of modes or inflections of thought 
and expression — (the ratiocinative, for example, the sarcastic, 
or the humorous) which are not only antagonistical to the 
nature of the poem, but absolutely forbidden by one of its 
most peculiar and indispensable adjuncts; we allude, of course, 
to rhythm. It may be added here, par parenthese, that the 
author who aims at the purely beautiful in a prose tale is 
laboring at a great disadvantage. For Beauty can be better 
treated in the poem. Not so with terror, or passion, or horror, 
or a multitude of such other points. And here it will be seen 
how full of prejudice are the usual animadversions against 
those tales of effect, many fine examples of which were found in 
the earlier numbers of Blackwood. The impressions produced 
were wrought in a legitimate sphere of action, and constituted 
a legitimate although sometimes an exaggerated interest. They 
were relished by every man of genius: although there were 
found many men of genius who condemned them without just 
ground. The true critic will but demand that the design in- 
tended be accomplished, to the fullest extent, by the means 
most advantageously applicable. 

We have very few American tales of real merit — we may 
say, indeed, none, with the exception of The Tales of a Traveller 
of Washington Irving, and these Twice-Told Tales of Mr. 
Hawthorne. Some of the pieces of Mr. John Neal abound in 
vigor and originality; but, in general, his compositions of this 
class are excessively diffuse, extravagant, and indicative of an 
imperfect sentiment of Art. Articles at random are, now and 
then, met with in our periodicals which might be advanta- 
geously compared with the best effusions of the British Maga- 
zines; but, upon the whole, we are far behind our progenitors 
in this department of literature. 

Of Mr. Hawthorne's tales we would say, emphatically, that 
they belong to the highest region of Art — an Art subservient 
to genius of a very lofty order. We had supposed, with good 
reason for so supposing, that he had been thrust into his pres- 
ent position by one of the impudent cliques which beset our 
literature, and whose pretensions it is our full purpose to expose 
at the earliest opportunity; but we have been most agreeably 
mistaken. We know of few compositions which the critic can 



HAWTHORNE'S TWICE-TOLD TALES 157 

more honestly commend than these Twice-Told Tales. As 
Americans, we feel proud of the book. 

Mr. Hawthorne's distinctive trait is invention, creation, 
imagination, originality — a trait which, in the literature of 
fiction, is positively worth all the rest. But the nature of the 
originality, so far as regards its manifestation in letters, is but 
imperfectly understood. The inventive or original mind as 
frequently displays itself in novelty of tone as in novelty of 
matter. Mr. Hawthorne is original in all points. 

It would be a matter of some difficulty to designate the best 
of these tales; we repeat that, without exception, they are 
beautiful. "Wakefield" is remarkable for the skill with which 
an old idea — a well-known incident — is worked up or dis- 
cussed. A man of whims conceives the purpose of quitting his 
wife and residing incognito, for twenty years, in her immediate 
neighborhood. Something of this kind actually happened in 
London. The force of Mr. Hawthorne's tale lies in the analysis 
of the motives which must or might have impelled the husband 
to such folly, in the first instance, with the possible causes of 
his perseverance. Upon this thesis a sketch of singular power 
has been constructed. 

"The Wedding Knell" is full of the boldest imagination — 
an imagination fully controlled by taste. The most captious 
critic could find no flaw in this production. 

"The Minister's Black Veil" is a masterly composition, of 
which the sole defect is that to the rabble its exquisite skill will 
be caviare. The obvious meaning of this article will be found to 
smother its insinuated one. The moral put into the mouth of 
the dying minister will be supposed to convey the true import 
of the narrative; and that a crime of dark dye (having refer- 
ence to the "young lady") has been committed, is a point 
which only minds congenial with that of the author will per- 
ceive. 

" Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe" is vividly original, and 
managed most dexterously. 

"Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" is exceedingly well imagined, 
and executed with surpassing ability. The artist breathes in 
every line of it. 

"The White Old Maid" is objectionable even more than the 
"Minister's Black Veil," on the score of its mysticism. Even 



158 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

with the thoughtful and analytic, there will be much trouble 
in penetrating its entire import. 

"The Hollow of the Three Hills " we would quote in full had 
we space; — not as evincing higher talent than any of the 
other pieces, but as affording an excellent example of the 
author's peculiar ability. The subject is commonplace. A witch 
subjects the Distant and the Past to the view of a mourner. It 
has been the fashion to describe, in such cases, a mirror in 
which the images of the absent appear; or a cloud of smoke is 
made to arise, and thence the figures are gradually unfolded. 
Mr. Hawthorne has wonderfully heightened his effect by mak- 
ing the ear, in place of the eye, the medium by which the fan- 
tasy is conveyed. The head of the mourner is enveloped in the 
cloak of the witch, and within its magic folds there arise sounds 
which have an all-sufficient intelligence. Throughout this arti- 
cle also, the artist is conspicuous — not more in positive than 
in negative merits. Not only is all done that should be done, 
but (what perhaps is an end with more difficulty attained) 
there is nothing done which should not be. Every word tells, 
and there is not a word which does not tell. 

In "Howe's Masquerade" we observe something which re- 
sembles plagiarism — but which may be a very flattering coin- 
cidence of thought. We quote the passage in question. 

[Quotation.] x 
The idea here is, that the figure in the cloak is the phantom 
or reduplication of Sir William Howe; but in an article called 
"William Wilson," one of the Tales of the Grotesque and Ara- 
besque, we have not only the same idea, but the same idea 
similarly presented in several respects. We quote two para- 
graphs, which our readers may compare with what has been 
already given. We have italicized, above, the immediate 
particulars of resemblance. 

[Quotation.] x 
Here it will be observed that, not only are the two general 
conceptions identical, but there are various points of similarity. 
In each case the figure seen is the wraith or duplication of the 
beholder. In each case the scene is a masquerade. In each case 
the figure is cloaked. In each, there is a quarrel — that is to 
1 Omitted here, as in the text of the Virginia Edition. 



SHADOW 159 

say, angry words pass between the parties. In each the be- 
holder is enraged. In each the cloak and sword fall upon the 
floor. The "villain, unmuffle yourself," of Mr. H. is precisely 
paralleled by a passage at page 56 of "William Wilson." 

In the way of objection we have scarcely a word to say of 
these tales. There is, perhaps, a somewhat too general or 
prevalent tone — a tone of melancholy and mysticism. The 
subjects are insufficiently varied. There is not so much of 
versatility evinced as we might well be warranted in expecting 
from the high powers of Mr. Hawthorne. But beyond these 
trivial exceptions we have really none to make. The style is 
purity itself. Force abounds. High imagination gleams from 
every page. Mr. Hawthorne is a man of the truest genius. We 
only regret that the limits of our Magazine will not permit us 
to pay him that full tribute of commendation, which, under 
other circumstances, we should be so eager to pay. 



SHADOW 

A PARABLE 1 

Yea! though I walk through the valley of the Shadow: 

— Psalm of David. 

Ye who read are still among the living: but I who write shall 
have long since gone my way into the region of shadows. For 
indeed strange things shall happen, and secret things be known, 
and many centuries shall pass away, ere these memorials be 
seen of men. And, when seen, there will be some to disbelieve 
and some to doubt, and yet a few who will find much to ponder 
upon in the characters here graven with a stylus of iron. 

The year had been a year of terror, and of feelings more 
intense than terror for which there is no name upon the earth. 
For many prodigies and signs had taken place, and far and 
wide, over sea and land, the black wings of the Pestilence were 
spread abroad. To those, nevertheless, cunning in the stars, it 
was not unknown that the heavens wore an aspect of ill; and 
to me, the Greek Oinos, 2 among others, it was evident that now 
had arrived the alternation of that seven hundred and ninety- 

1 Published in The Southern Literary Messenger, September, 1835. 

2 Oinos is Greek for " wine." 



i6o EDGAR ALLAN POE 

fourth year when, at the entrance of Aries, the planet Jupiter 
is conjoined with the red ring of the terrible Saturnus. The 
peculiar spirit of the skies, if I mistake not greatly, made itself 
manifest, not only in the physical orb of the earth, but in the 
souls, imaginations, and meditations of mankind. 

Over some flasks of the red Chian wine, within the walls of 
a noble hall in a dim city called Ptolemais, we sat, at night, a 
company of seven. And to our chamber there was no entrance 
save by a lofty door of brass : and the door was fashioned by the 
artisan Corinnos, and, being of rare workmanship, was fas- 
tened from within. Black draperies likewise, in the gloomy 
room, shut out from our view the moon, the lurid stars, and the 
peopleless streets — but the boding and the memory of Evil, 
they would not be so excluded. There were things around us 
and about of which I can render no distinct account — things 
material and spiritual — heaviness in the atmosphere — a 
sense of suffocation — anxiety — and, above all, that terrible 
state of existence which the nervous experience when the senses 
are keenly living and awake, and meanwhile the powers of 
thought lie dormant. A dead weight hung upon us. It hung 
upon our limbs — upon the household furniture — upon the 
goblets from which we drank; and all things were depressed 
and borne down thereby — all things save only the flames of 
the seven iron lamps which illumined our revel. Uprearing 
themselves in tall slender lines of light, they thus remained 
burning all pallid and motionless; and in the mirror which their 
lustre formed upon the round table of ebony at which we sat, 
each of us there assembled beheld the pallor of his own counte- 
nance, and the unquiet glare in the downcast eyes of his com- 
panions. Yet we laughed and were merry in our proper way — 
which was hysterical; and sang the songs of Anacreon — which 
are madness; and drank deeply — although the purple wine 
reminded us of blood. For there was yet another tenant of our 
chamber in the person of young Zoi'lus. Dead and at full length 
he lay, enshrouded; — the genius and the demon of the scene. 
Alas! he bore no portion in our mirth, save that his counte- 
nance, distorted with the plague, and his eyes in which Death 
had but half extinguished the fire of the pestilence, seemed to 
take such interest in our merriment as the dead may haply 
take in the merriment of those who are to die. But although I, 



SHADOW 161 

Oinos, felt that the eyes of the departed were upon me, still I 
forced myself not to perceive the bitterness of their expression, 
and, gazing down steadily into the depths of the ebony mirror, 
sang with a loud and sonorous voice the songs of the son of 
Teios. But gradually my songs they ceased, and their echoes, 
rolling afar off among the sable draperies of the chamber, be- 
came weak, and undistinguishable, and so faded away. And 
lo! from among those sable draperies where the sounds of the 
song departed, there came forth a dark and undefined shadow 
— a shadow such as the moon, when low in heaven, might 
fashion from the figure of a man : but it was the shadow neither 
of man, nor of God, nor of any familiar thing. And, quivering 
awhile among the draperies of the room, it at length rested in 
full view upon the surface of the door of brass. But the shadow 
was vague, and formless, and indefinite, and was the shadow 
neither of man, nor of God — neither God of Greece, nor God 
of Chaldaea, nor any Egyptian God. And the shadow rested 
upon the brazen doorway, and under the arch of the entabla- 
ture of the door, and moved not, nor spoke any word, but there 
became stationary and remained. And the door whereupon the 
shadow rested was, if I remember aright, over against the feet 
of the young Zoi'lus enshrouded. But we, the seven there 
assembled, having seen the shadow as it came out from among 
the draperies, dared not steadily behold it, but cast down our 
eyes, and gazed continually into the depths of the mirror of 
ebony. And at length I, Oinos, speaking some low words, de- 
manded of the shadow its dwelling and its appellation. And 
the shadow answered, "I am SHADOW, and my dwelling is 
near to the catacombs of Ptolemais, and hard by those dim 
plains of Helusion 1 which border upon the foul Charonian 
canal." 2 And then did we, the seven, start from our seats in 
horror, and stand trembling, and shuddering, and aghast: for 
the tones in the voice of the shadow were not the tones of any 
one being, but of a multitude of beings, and, varying in their 
cadences from syllable to syllable, fell duskily upon our ears in 
the well-remembered and familiar accents of many thousand 
departed friends. 

1 Elysium. 

2 The river over which Charon ferried the souls to Hades. 



162 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH 1 

The "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No 
pestilence had ever been so fatal or so hideous. Blood was its 
Avatar and its seal — the redness and the horror of blood. 
There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then pro- 
fuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains 
upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were 
the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the 
sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, 
and termination of the disease were the incidents of half an 
hour. 

But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and saga- 
cious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he sum- 
moned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends 
from among the knights and dames of his court, and with 
these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated 
abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the 
creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste. A 
strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. 
The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy 
hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means 
neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair 
or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. 
With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to con- 
tagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the 
mean time it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had 
provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, 
there were improvisatori, there were ballet dancers, there were 
musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and 
security were within. Without was the "Red Death." 

It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his 
seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, 
that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a 
masked ball of the most unusual magnificence. 

It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let 

me tell of the rooms in which it was held. There were seven 

— an imperial suite. In many palaces, however, such suites 

form a long and straight vista, while the folding doors slide 

1 Published in Graham's Magazine, May, 1842. 



THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH 163 

back nearly to the walls on either hand, so that the view of the 
whole extent is scarcely impeded. Here the case was very dif- 
ferent, as might have been expected from the prince's love of 
the bizarre. The apartments were so irregularly disposed that 
the vision embraced but little more than one at a time. There 
was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and at each 
turn a novel effect. To the right and left, in the middle of each 
wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window looked out upon a closed 
corridor which pursued the windings of the suite. These win- 
dows were of stained glass whose color varied in accordance 
with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber into 
which it opened. That' at the eastern extremity was hung, for 
example, in blue — and vividly blue were its windows. The 
second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and 
here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout, 
and so were the casements. The fourth was furnished and 
lighted with orange — the fifth with white — the sixth with 
violet. The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black 
velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the 
walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material 
and hue. But in this chamber only, the color of the windows 
failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes here were 
scarlet — a deep blood-color. Now in no one of the seven 
apartments was there any lamp or candelabrum, amid the 
profusion of golden ornaments that lay scattered to and fro or 
depended from the roof. There was no light of any kind ema- 
nating from lamp or candle within the suite of chambers. But 
in the corridors that followed the suite there stood, opposite to 
each window, a heavy tripod, bearing a brazier of fire, that pro- 
jected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly illu- 
mined the room. And thus were produced a multitude of gaudy 
and fantastic appearances. But in the western or black cham- 
ber the effect of the fire-light that streamed upon the dark 
hangings through the blood-tinted panes was ghastly in the 
extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the countenances of 
those who entered, that there were few of the company bold 
enough to set foot within its precincts at all. 

It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the 
western wall a gigantic clock of ebony. Its pendulum swung to 
and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and, when the 



164 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to 
be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a 
sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly 
musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each 
lapse of an hour, the musicians of the orchestra were constrained 
to pause, momentarily, in their performance, to hearken to the 
sound; and thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions; 
and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; 
and, while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed 
that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate 
passed their hands over their brows as if in confused reverie or 
meditation. But when the echoes had fully ceased, a light 
laughter at once pervaded the assembly; the musicians looked 
at each other and smiled as if at their own nervousness and 
folly, and made whispering vows, each to the other, that the 
next chiming of the clock should produce in them no similar 
emotion; and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes (which em- 
brace three thousand and six hundred seconds of the Time that 
flies), there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then 
were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation 
as before. 

But, in spite of these things, it was a gay and magnificent 
revel. The tastes of the prince were peculiar. He had a fine eye 
for colors and effects. He disregarded the decora x of mere 
fashion. His plans were bold and fiery, and his conceptions 
glowed with barbaric lustre. There are some who would have 
thought him mad. His followers felt that he was not. It was 
necessary to hear and see and touch him to be sure that he was 
not. 

He had directed, in great part, the moveable embellishments 
of the seven chambers, upon occasion of this great fete; and it 
was his own guiding taste which had given character to the 
masqueraders. Be sure they were grotesque. There were much 
glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm — much of 
what has been since seen in Hernani. 2 There were arabesque 
figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were 
delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There was much 
of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, 
something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might 
1 Proprieties. 2 A famous play by Victor Hugo. 



THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH 165 

have excited disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers there 
stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams. And these — the 
dreams — writhed in and about, taking hue from the rooms, 
and causing the wild music of the orchestra to seem as the echo 
of their steps. And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which 
stands in the hall of the velvet. And then, for a moment, all is 
still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock. The dreams are 
stiff-frozen as they stand. But the echoes of the chime die 
away — they have endured but an instant — and a light, half- 
subdued laughter floats after them as they depart. And now 
again the music swells, and the dreams live, and writhe to and 
fro more merrily than ever, taking hue from the many tinted 
windows through which stream the rays from the tripods. But 
to the chamber which lies most westwardly of the seven there 
are now none of the maskers who venture; for the night is 
waning away; and there flows a ruddier light through the blood- 
colored panes; and the blackness of the sable drapery appalls; 
and, to him whose foot falls upon the sable carpet, there comes 
from the near clock of ebony a muffled peal more solemnly 
emphatic than any which reaches their ears who indulge in the 
more remote gayeties of the other apartments. 

But these other apartments were densely crowded, and in 
them beat feverishly the heart of life. And the revel went 
whirlingly on, until at length there commenced the sounding 
of midnight upon the clock. And then the music ceased, 
as I have told; and the evolutions of the waltzers were 
quieted; and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as 
before. But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by 
the bell of the clock; and thus it happened, perhaps, that more 
of thought crept, with more of time, into the meditations of the 
thoughtful among those who reveled. And thus too it happened, 
perhaps, that before the last echoes of the last chime had 
utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the 
crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence 
of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no 
single individual before. And the rumor of this new presence 
having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length 
from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, expressive of dis- 
approbation and surprise — then, finally, of terror, of horror, 
and of disgust. 



166 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may 
well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have 
excited such sensation. In truth the masquerade license of the 
night was nearly unlimited; but the figure in question had out- 
Heroded Herod, and gone beyond the bounds of even the 
prince's indefinite decorum. There are chords in the hearts of 
the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. 
Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally 
jests, there are matters of which no jests can be made. The 
whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the 
costume and bearing of the stranger neither wit nor propriety 
existed. The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from 
head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which 
concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the coun- 
tenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have 
had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might 
have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revelers 
around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the 
type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood — 
and. his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was be- 
sprinkled with the scarlet horror. 

When the eyes of Prince Prospero fell upon this spectral 
image (which with a slow and solemn movement, as if more 
fully to sustain its role, stalked to and fro among the waltzers) 
he was seen to be convulsed, in the first moment, with a strong 
shudder either of terror or distaste; but, in the next, his brow 
reddened with rage. 

"Who dares?" he demanded hoarsely of the courtiers who 
stood near him — "who dares insult us with this blasphemous 
mockery? Seize him and unmask him — that we may know 
whom we have to hang at sunrise from the battlements!" 

It was in the eastern or blue chamber in which stood the 
Prince Prospero as he uttered these words. They rang through- 
out the seven rooms loudly and clearly — for the prince was a 
bold and robust man, and the music had become hushed at the 
waving of his hand. 

It was in the blue room where stood the prince, with a group 
of pale courtiers by his side. At first, as he spoke, there was 
a slight rushing movement of this group in the direction of the 
intruder, who at the moment was also near at hand, and now, 



THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH 167 

with deliberate and stately step, made closer approach to the 
speaker. But from a certain nameless awe with which the mad 
assumption of the mummer had inspired the whole party, 
there were found none who put forth hand to seize him; so 
that, unimpeded, he passed within a yard of the prince's per- 
son; and, while the vast assembly, as if with one impulse, 
shrank from the centres of the rooms to the walls, he made his 
way uninterruptedly, but with the same solemn and measured 
step which had distinguished him from the first, through the 
blue chamber to the purple — through the purple to the green 
— through the green to the orange — through this again to 
the white — and even thence to the violet, ere a decided move- 
ment had been made to arrest him. It was then, however, that 
the Prince Prospero, maddening with rage and the shame of his 
own momentary cowardice, rushed hurriedly through the six 
chambers, while none followed him on account of a deadly 
terror that had seized upon all. He bore aloft a drawn dagger, 
and had approached, in rapid impetuosity, to within three or 
four feet of the retreating figure, when the latter, having at- 
tained the extremity of the velvet apartment, turned suddenly 
and confronted his pursuer. There was a sharp cry — and the 
dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which, 
instantly afterwards, fell prostrate in death the Prince Pros- 
pero. Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng 
of the revelers at once threw themselves into the black apart- 
ment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect 
and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in 
unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpse- 
like mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, un- 
tenanted by any tangible form. 

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. 
He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped 
the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died 
each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the 
ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the 
flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and 
the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all. 



168 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO 1 

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best 
could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. 
You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, 
however, that I gave utterance to a threat. At length I would 
be avenged; this was a point definitely settled — but the very 
definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of 
ri'sk. I must not only punish, but punish with impunity. A 
wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. 
It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make him- 
self felt as such to him who has done the wrong. 

It must be understood that neither by word nor deed had I 
given Fortunato cause to doubt my good-will. I continued, as 
was my wont, to smile in his face, and he did not perceive that 
my smile now was at the thought of his immolation. 

He had a weak point — this Fortunato — although in other 
regards he was a man to be respected and even feared. He 
prided himself on his connoisseurship in wine. Few Italians 
have the true virtuoso spirit. For the most part their enthusi- 
asm is adopted to suit the time and opportunity to practise 
imposture upon the British and Austrian millionaires. In 
painting and gemmary Fortunato, like his countrymen, was a 
quack, but in the matter of old wines he was sincere. In this re- 
spect I did not differ from him materially; — I was skilful in the 
Italian vintages myself, and bought largely whenever I could. 

It was about dusk, one evening during the supreme madness 
of the carnival season, that I encountered my friend. He 
accosted me with excessive warmth, for he had been drinking 
much. The man wore motley. He had on a tight-fitting parti- 
striped dress, and his head was surmounted by the conical cap 
and bells. I was so pleased to see him, that I thought I should 
never have done wringing his hand. 

I said to him — "My dear Fortunato, you are luckily met. 
How remarkably well you are looking to-day! But I have re- 
ceived a pipe of what passes for Amontillado, and I have my 
doubts." 

"How?" said he. "Amontillado? A pipe? Impossible! And 
in the middle of the carnival!" 

1 Published in Godey's Lady's Book, November, 1846. 



THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO 169 

"I have my doubts," I replied; "and I was silly enough to 
pay the full Amontillado price without consulting you in the 
matter. You were not to be found, and I was fearful of losing 
a bargain." 

"Amontillado!" 

"I have my doubts." 

"Amontillado!" 

"And I must satisfy them." 

"Amontillado!" 

"As you are engaged, I am on my way to Luchesi. If any 
one has a critical turn, it is he. He will tell me — " 

"Luchesi cannot tell Amontillado from Sherry." 

"And yet some fools will have it that his taste is a match for 
your own." 

"Come, let us go." 

"Whither?" 

"To your vaults." 

"My friend, no; I will not impose upon your good nature. 
I perceive you have an engagement. Luchesi — " 

"I have no engagement; — come." 

"My friend, no. It is not the engagement, but the severe 
cold with which I perceive you are afflicted. The vaults are 
insufferably damp. They are encrusted with nitre." 

"Let us go, nevertheless. The cold is merely nothing. Amon- 
tillado ! You have been imposed upon ; and as for Luchesi, he 
cannot distinguish Sherry from Amontillado." 

Thus speaking, Fortunato possessed himself of my arm; 
and putting on a mask of black silk and drawing a roquelaure 
closely about my person, I suffered him to hurry me to my 
palazzo. 

There were no attendants at home; they had absconded to 
make merry in honor of the time. I had told them that I should 
not return until the morning, and had given them' explicit 
orders not to stir from the house. These orders were sufficient, 
I well knew, to insure their immediate disappearance, one and 
all, as soon as my back was turned. 

I took from their sconces two flambeaux, and giving one to 
Fortunato, bowed him through several suites of rooms to the 
archway that led into the vaults. I passed down a long and 
winding staircase, requesting him to be cautious as he followed. 



170 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

We came at length to the foot of the descent, and stood to- 
gether on the damp ground of the catacombs of the Montresors. 

The gait of my friend was unsteady, and the bells upon his 
cap jingled as he strode. 

"The pipe," he said. 

"It is farther on," said I; "but observe the white web-work 
which gleams from these cavern walls." 

He turned towards me, and looked into my eyes with two 
filmy orbs that distilled the rheum of intoxication. 

"Nitre?" he asked, at length. 

"Nitre," I replied. "How long have you had that cough!" 

"Ugh! ugh! ugh! — ugh! ugh! ugh! — ugh! ugh! ugh! — 
ugh! ugh! ugh! — ugh! ugh! ugh!" 

My poor friend found it impossible to reply for many 
minutes. 

"It is nothing," he said, at last. 

" Come," I said, with decision, "we will go back; your health 
is precious. You are rich, respected, admired, beloved; you 
are happy, as once I was. You are a man to be missed. For me 
it is no matter. We will go back; you will be ill, and I cannot 
be responsible. Besides, there is Luchesi — " 

"Enough," he said; "the cough is a mere nothing; it will not 
kill me. I shall not die of a cough." 

"True — true," I replied ; " and, indeed, I had no intention of 
alarming you unnecessarily — but you should use all proper cau- 
tion. A draught of this Medoc will defend us from the damps." 

Here I knocked off the neck of a bottle which I drew from a 
long row of its fellows that lay upon the mould. 

"Drink," I said, presenting him the wine. 

He raised it to his lips with a leer. He paused and nodded to 
me familiarly, while his bells jingled. 

"I drink," he said, "to the buried that repose around us." 

"And I to your long life." 

He again took my arm, and we proceeded. 

"These vaults," he said, "are extensive." 

"The Montresors," I replied, "were a great and numerous 
family." 

"I forgot your arms." 

"A huge human foot d'or, in a field azure; the foot crushes 
a serpent rampant whose fangs are imbedded in the heel." 



THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO 171 

"And the motto?" 

" Nemo me impune lacessit" 1 

"Good!" he said. 

The wine sparkled in his eyes and the bells jingled. My own 
fancy grew warm with the Medoc. We had passed through walls 
of piled bones, with casks and puncheons intermingling, into 
the inmost recesses of the catacombs. I paused again, and this 
time I made bold to seize Fortunato by an arm above the elbow. 

"The nitre!" I said; "see, it increases. It hangs like moss 
upon the vaults. We are below the river's bed. The drops of 
moisture trickle among the bones. Come, we will go back ere 
it is too late. Your cough — " 

"It is nothing," he said; "let us go on. But first, another 
draught of the Medoc." 

I broke and reached him a flagon of De Grave. He emptied 
it at a breath. His eyes flashed with a fierce light. He laughed 
and threw the bottle upwards with a gesticulation I did not 
understand. 

I looked at him in surprise. He repeated the movement — a 
grotesque one. 

"You do not comprehend?" he said. 

"Not I," I replied. 

"Then j^ou are not of the brotherhood." 

"How?" 

"You are not of the masons." 

"Yes, yes," I said; "yes, yes." 

"You? Impossible! A mason?" 

"A mason," I replied. 

"A sign," he said, "a sign." 

"It is this," I answered, producing from beneath the folds of 
my roquelaure a trowel. 

"You jest," he exclaimed, recoiling a few paces. "But let 
us proceed to the Amontillado." 

"Be it so," I said, replacing the tool beneath the cloak, and 
again offering him my arm. He leaned upon it heavily. We 
continued our route in search of the Amontillado. We passed 
through a range of low arches, descended, passed on, and de- 
scended again, arrived at a deep crypt, in which the foulness of 
the air caused our flambeaux rather to glow than flame. 
1 "No one injures me with impunity." 



172 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

At the most remote end of the crypt there appeared another 
less spacious. Its walls had been lined with human remains 
piled to the vault overhead, in the fashion of the great cata- 
combs of Paris. Three sides of this interior crypt were still 
ornamented in this manner. From the fourth the bones had 
been thrown down, and lay promiscuously upon the earth, 
forming at one point a mound of some size. Within the wall 
thus exposed by the displacing of the bones, we perceived a 
still interior recess, in depth about four feet, in width three, in 
height six or seven. It seemed to have been constructed for 
no especial use within itself, but formed merely the interval 
between two of the colossal supports of the roof of the cata- 
combs, and was backed by one of their circumscribing walls of 
solid granite. 

It was in vain that Fortunato, uplifting his dull torch, en- 
deavored to pry into the depths of the recess. Its termina- 
tion the feeble light did not enable us to see. 

"Proceed," I said; "herein is the Amontillado. As for 
Luchesi — " 

"He is an ignoramus," interrupted my friend, as he stepped 
unsteadily forward, while I followed immediately at his heels. 
In an instant he had reached the extremity of the niche, and 
finding his progress arrested by the rock, stood stupidly bewil- 
dered. A moment more and I had fettered him to the granite. 
In its surface were two iron staples, distant from each other 
about two feet, horizontally. From one of these depended a 
short chain, from the other a padlock. Throwing the links 
about his waist, it was but the work of a few seconds to secure 
it. He was too much astounded to resist. Withdrawing the 
key I stepped back from the recess. 

"Pass your hand," I said, "over the wall; you cannot help 
feeling the nitre. Indeed it is very damp. Once more let me 
implore you to return. No? Then I must positively leave you. 
But I must first render you all the little attentions in my power." 

"The Amontillado ! " ejaculated my friend, not yet recovered 
from his astonishment. 

"True," I replied; "the Amontillado." 

As I said these words I busied myself among the pile of bones 
of which I have before spoken. Throwing them aside, I soon 
uncovered a quantity of building stone and mortar. With these 



THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO 173 

materials and with the aid of my trowel, I began vigorously to 
wall up the entrance of the niche. 

I had scarcely laid the first tier of the masonry when I dis- 
covered that the intoxication of Fortunato had in a great 
measure worn off. The earliest indication I had of this was a 
low moaning cry from the depth of the recess. It was not the 
cry of a drunken man. There was then a long and obstinate 
silence. I laid the second tier, and the third, and the fourth; 
and then I heard the furious vibrations of the chain. The 
noise lasted for several minutes, during which, that I might 
hearken to it with the more satisfaction, I ceased my labors 
and sat down upon the bones. When at last the clanking sub- 
sided, I resumed the trowel, and finished without interruption 
the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh tier. The wall was now 
nearly upon a level with my breast. I again paused, and hold- 
ing the flambeaux over the mason-work, threw a few feeble 
rays upon the figure within. 

A succession of loud and shrill screams, bursting suddenly 
from the throat of the chained form, seemed to thrust me 
violently back. For a brief moment I hesitated, I trembled. 
Unsheathing my rapier, I began to grope with it about the 
recess; but the thought of an instant reassured me. I placed 
my hand upon the solid fabric of the catacombs, and felt satis- 
fied. I reapproached the wall. I replied to the yells of him who 
clamored. I reechoed, I aided, I surpassed them in volume 
and in strength. I did this, and the clamorer grew still. 

It was now midnight, and my task was drawing to a close. 
I had completed the eighth, the ninth, and the tenth tier. I 
had finished a portion of the last and the eleventh; there 
remained but a single stone to be fitted and plastered in. I 
struggled with its weight; I placed it partially in its destined 
position. But now there came from out the niche a low laugh 
that erected the hairs upon my head. It was succeeded by a 
sad voice, which I had difficulty in recognizing as that of the 
noble Fortunato. The voice said — 

"Ha! ha! ha! — he! he! — a very good joke indeed — an 
excellent jest. We will have many a rich laugh about it at the 
palazzo — he! he! he! — over our wine — he! he! he!" 

"The Amontillado!" I said. 

"He! he! he! — he! he! he! — yes, the Amontillado. But is 



174 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

it not getting late? Will not they be awaiting us at the palazzo, 
the Lady Fortunato and the rest? Let us be gone." 

"Yes," I said, "let us be gone." 

"For the love of God, Montresor!" 

"Yes," I said, "for the love of God!" 

But to these words I hearkened in vain for a reply. I grew 
impatient. I called aloud — 

"Fortunato!" 

No answer. I called again — 

"Fortunato!" 

No answer still. I thrust a torch through the remaining 
aperture and let it fall within. There came forth in return only 
a jingling of the bells. My heart grew sick — on account of the 
dampness of the catacombs. I hastened to make an end of my 
labor. I forced the last stone into its position; I plastered it up. 
Against the new masonry I reerected the old rampart of bones. 
For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace 
requiescat! l 

THE PURLOINED LETTER 2 

"Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio." 3 

— Seneca. 

At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn 
of 18 — , I was enjoying the twofold luxury of meditation and a 
meerschaum, in company with my friend C. Auguste Dupin, 
in his little back library, or book-closet, au troisieme, No. 33 
Rue Dunot, Faubourg St. Germain. For one hour at least we 
had maintained a profound silence; while each, to any casual 
observer, might have seemed intently and exclusively occupied 
with the curling eddies of smoke that oppressed the atmosphere 
of the chamber. For myself, however, I was mentally discuss- 
ing certain topics which had formed matter for conversation 
between us at an earlier period of the evening ; I mean the affair 
of the Rue Morgue, and the mystery attending the murder of 
Marie Roget. 4 I looked upon it, therefore, as something of a 
coincidence, when the door of our apartment was thrown open 

1 May he rest in peace! 2 Published in an annual, The Gift, 1845. 

3 "Nothing is more odious to wisdom than too much acumen." 

4 Cf . "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Mystery of Marie Rogfit." 



THE PURLOINED LETTER 175 

and admitted our old acquaintance, Monsieur G , the Pre- 
fect of the Parisian police. 

We gave him a hearty welcome; for there was nearly half as 
much of the entertaining as of the contemptible about the man, 
and we had not seen him for several years. We had been sitting 
in the dark, and Dupin now arose for the purpose of lighting a 
lamp, but sat down again, without doing so, upon G.'s saying 
that he had called to consult us, or rather to ask the opinion of 
my friend, about some official business which had occasioned 
a great deal of trouble. 

"If it is any point requiring reflection," observed Dupin, as 
he forbore to enkindle the wick, "we shall examine it to better 
purpose in the dark." 

"That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who 
had a fashion of calling everything "odd" that was beyond his 
comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of 
"oddities." 

"Very true," said Dupin, as he supplied his visitor with a 
pipe, and rolled towards him a comfortable chair. 

"And what is the difficulty now?" I asked. "Nothing more 
in the assassination way, I hope?" 

"Oh no; nothing of that nature. The fact is, the business is 
very simple indeed, and I make no doubt that we can manage it 
sufficiently well ourselves; but then I thought Dupin would 
like to hear the details of it, because it is so excessively odd." 

"Simple and odd," said Dupin. 

"Why, yes; and not exactly that either. The fact is, we have 
all been a good deal puzzled because the affair is so simple, and 
yet baffles us altogether." 

" Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing which puts you 
at fault," said my friend. 

"What nonsense you do talk!" replied the Prefect, laughing 
heartily. 

"Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain," said Dupin. 

"Oh, good heavens! whoever heard of such an idea?" 

"A little too self-evident." 

"Ha! ha! ha! — ha! ha! ha! — ho! ho! ho!" roared our visi- 
tor, profoundly amused, "oh, Dupin, you will be the death of 
me yet!" 

"And what, after all, is the matter on hand?" I asked. 



176 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

"Why, I will tell you," replied the Prefect, as he gave a long, 
steady, and contemplative puff, and settled himself in his chair. 
"I will tell you in a few words; but, before I begin, let me 
caution you that this is an affair demanding the greatest 
secrecy, and that I should most probably lose the position I 
now hold were it known that I confided it to any one." 

"Proceed," said I. 

"Or not," said Dupin. 

"Well, then; I have received personal information, from a 
very high quarter that a certain document of the last impor- 
tance has been purloined from the royal apartments. The indi- 
vidual who purloined it is known; this beyond a doubt; he was 
seen to take it. It is known, also, that it still remains in his 
possession." 

"How is this known?" asked Dupin. 

"It is clearly inferred," replied the Prefect, "from the nature 
of the document, and from the non-appearance of certain 
results which would at once arise from its passing out of the 
robber's possession; — that is to say, from his employing it as 
he must design in the end to employ it." 

"Be a little more explicit," I said. 

"Well, I may venture so far as to say that the paper gives its 
holder a certain power in a certain quarter where such power 
is immensely valuable." The Prefect was fond of the cant of 
diplomacy. 

"Still I do not quite understand," said Dupin. 

"No? Well; the disclosure of the document to a third per- 
son, who shall be nameless, would bring in question the honor 
of a personage of most exalted station; and this fact gives the 
holder of the document an ascendency over the illustrious per- 
sonage whose honor and peace are so jeopardized." 

"But this ascendency," I interposed, "would depend upon 
the robber's knowledge of the loser's knowledge of the robber. 
Who would dare — " 

"The thief," said G , "is the Minister D , who dares 

all things, those unbecoming as well as those becoming a man. 
The method of the theft was not less ingenious than bold. The 
document in question — a letter, to be frank — had been 
received by the personage robbed while alone in the royal 
boudoir. During its perusal she was suddenly interrupted by 



THE PURLOINED LETTER 177 

the entrance of the other exalted personage from whom espe- 
cially it was her wish to conceal it. After a hurried and vain 
endeavor to thrust it in a drawer, she was forced to place it, 
open as it was, upon a table. The address, however, was upper- 
most, and the contents thus unexposed, the letter escaped 

notice. At this juncture enters the Minister D . His lynx 

eye immediately perceives the paper, recognizes the hand- 
writing of the address, observes the confusion of the personage 
addressed, and fathoms her secret. After some business trans- 
actions, hurried through in his ordinary manner, he produces a 
letter somewhat similar to the one in question, opens it, pretends 
to read it, and then places it in close juxtaposition to the other. 
Again he converses for some fifteen minutes upon the public 
affairs. At length, in taking leave, he takes also from the table 
the letter to which he had no claim. Its rightful owner saw, but 
of course dared not call attention to the act in the presence of 
the third personage, who stood at her elbow. The minister 
decamped ; leaving his own letter — one of no importance — 
upon the table." 

"Here, then," said Dupin to me, "you have precisely what 
you demand to make the ascendency complete — the robber's 
knowledge of the loser's knowledge of the robber." 

"Yes," replied the prefect; "and the power thus attained 
has, for some months past, been wielded for political purposes 
to a very dangerous extent. The personage robbed is more 
thoroughly convinced every day of the necessity of reclaiming 
her letter. But this of course cannot be done openly. In fine, 
driven to despair, she has committed the matter to me." 

"Than whom," said Dupin, amid a perfect whirlwind of 
smoke, "no more sagacious agent could, I suppose, be desired, 
or even imagined." 

"You flatter me," replied the Prefect; "but it is possible that 
some such opinion may have been entertained." 

"It is clear," said I, "as you observe, that the letter is still 
in possession of the minister; since it is this possession, and 
not any employment of the letter, which bestows the power. 
With the employment the power departs." 

"True," said G ; "and upon this conviction I proceeded. 

My first care was to make thorough search of the minister's 
hotel; and here my chief embarrassment lay in the necessity of 



178 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

searching without his knowledge. Beyond all things, I have 
been warned of the danger which would result from giving him 
reason to suspect our design." 

"But," said I, "you are quite au fait in these investigations. 
The Parisian police have done this thing often before." 

"O yes; and for this reason I did not despair. The habits of 
the minister gave me, too, a great advantage. He is frequently 
absent from home all night. His servants are by no means 
numerous. They sleep at a distance from their master's apart- 
ment, and being chiefly Neapolitans, are readily made drunk. 
I have keys, as you know, with which I can open any chamber 
or cabinet in Paris. For three months a night has not passed, 
during the greater part of which I have not been engaged, 
personally, in ransacking the D Hotel. My honor is inter- 
ested, and, to mention a great secret, the reward is enormous. 
So I did not abandon the search until I had become fully satis- 
fied that the thief is a more astute man than myself. I fancy 
that I have investigated every nook and corner of the premises 
in which it is possible that the paper can be concealed." 

"But is it not possible," I suggested, "that although the 
letter may be in possession of the minister, as it unquestionably 
is, he may have concealed it elsewhere than upon his own 
premises? " 

" This is barely possible," said Dupin. " The present peculiar 
condition of affairs at court, and especially of those intrigues in 

which D is known to be involved, would render the instant 

availability of the document — its susceptibility of being pro- 
duced at a moment's notice — a point of nearly equal impor- 
tance with its possession." 

"Its susceptibility of being produced?" said I. 

"That is to say of being destroyed," said Dupin. 

"True," I observed; "the paper is clearly then upon the 
premises. As for its being upon the person of the minister, we 
may consider that as out of the question." 

"Entirely," said the Prefect. "He has been twice waylaid, 
as if by footpads, and his person rigorously searched under my 
own inspection." 

"You might have spared yourself this trouble," said Dupin. 

"D , I presume, is not altogether a fool, and, if not, must 

have anticipated these waylayings as a matter of course." 



THE PURLOINED LETTER 179 

"Not altogether a fool," said G ; "but then he's a poet, 

which I take to be only one remove from a fool." 

"True," said Dupin, after a long and thoughtful whiff from 
his meerschaum, "although I have been guilty of certain 
doggerel myself." 

"Suppose you detail," said I, "the particulars of your 
search." 

"Why, the fact is, we took our time, and we searched every- 
where. I have had long experience in these affairs. I took 
the entire building, room by room; devoting the nights of a 
whole week to each. We examined, first, the furniture of each 
apartment. We opened every possible drawer; and I presume 
you know that, to a properly trained police-agent, such a thing 
as a secret drawer is impossible. Any man is a dolt who per- 
mits a 'secret' drawer to escape him in a search of this kind. 
The thing is so plain. There is a certain amount of bulk — of 
space — to be accounted for in every cabinet. Then we have 
accurate rules. The fiftieth part of a line could not escape us. 
After the cabinets we took the chairs. The cushions we probed 
with the fine long needles you have seen me employ. From the 
tables we removed the tops." 

"Why so?" 

"Sometimes the top of a table, or other similarly arranged 
piece of furniture, is removed by the person wishing to con- 
ceal an article; then the leg is excavated, the article deposited 
within the cavity, and the top replaced. The bottoms and tops 
of bedposts are employed in the same way." 

"But could not the cavity be detected by sounding?" I 
askedr 

"By no means, if, when the article is deposited, a sufficient 
wadding of cotton be placed around it. Besides, in our case, 
we were obliged to proceed without noise." 

"But you could not have removed — you could not have 
taken to pieces all articles of furniture in which it would have 
been possible to make a deposit in the manner you mention. 
A letter may be compressed into a thin spiral roll, not differing 
much in shape or bulk from a large knitting-needle, and in this 
form it might be inserted into the rung of a chair, for example. 
You did not take to pieces all the chairs?" 

"Certainly not; but we did better — we examined the rungs 



180 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

of every chair in the hotel, and, indeed, the jointings of every 
description of furniture, by the aid of a most powerful micro- 
scope. Had there been any traces of recent disturbance we 
should not have failed to detect it instantly. A single grain 
of gimlet-dust, for example, would have been as obvious as an 
apple. Any disorder in the glueing — any unusual gaping in 
the joints — would have sufficed to insure detection." 

"I presume you looked to the mirrors, between the boards 
and the plates, and you probed the beds and the bedclothes, as 
well as the curtains and carpets." 

"That of course; and when we had absolutely completed 
every particle of the furniture in this way, then we examined 
the house itself. We divided its entire surface into compart- 
ments, which we numbered, so that none might be missed; 
then we scrutinized each individual square inch throughout the 
premises, including the two houses immediately adjoining, with 
the microscope, as before." 

" The two houses adjoining? " I exclaimed ; " you must have 
had a great deal of trouble." 

"We had; but the reward offered is prodigious." 

"You include the grounds about the houses?" 

"All the grounds are paved with brick. They gave us com- 
paratively little trouble. We examined the moss between the 
bricks, and found it undisturbed." 

"You looked among D 's papers, of course, and into the 

books of the library?" 

"Certainly; we opened every package and parcel; we not 
only opened every book, but we turned over every leaf in each 
volume, not contenting ourselves with a mere shake, according 
to the fashion of some of our police-officers. We also measured 
the thickness of every book-cover, with the most accurate 
admeasurement, and applied to each the most jealous scrutiny 
of the microscope. Had any of the bindings been recently med- 
dled with, it would have been utterly impossible that the 
fact should have escaped observation. Some five or six vol- 
umes, just from the hands of the binder, we carefully probed, 
longitudinally, with the needles." 

"You explored the floors beneath the carpets?" 

"Beyond doubt. We removed every carpet, and examined 
the boards with the microscope." 



THE PURLOINED LETTER 181 

"And the paper on the walls?" 

"Yes." 

"You looked into the cellars?" 

"We did." 

"Then," I said, "you have been making a miscalculation, 
and the letter is not upon the premises, as you suppose." 

"I fear you are right there," said the Prefect. "And now, 
Dupin, what would you advise me to do?" 

"To make a thorough re-search of the premises." 

"That is absolutely needless," replied G . "I am not 

more sure that I breathe than I am that the letter is not at the 
hotel." 

"I have no better advice to give you," said Dupin. "You 
have, of course, an accurate description of the letter?" 

"Oh, yes!" — And here the Prefect, producing a memoran- 
dum-book, proceeded to read aloud a minute account of the 
internal, and especially of the external appearance of the miss- 
ing document. Soon after finishing the perusal of this descrip- 
tion, he took his departure, more entirely depressed in spirits 
than I had ever known the good gentleman before. 

In about a month afterwards he paid us another visit, and 
found us occupied very nearly as before. He took a pipe and 
a chair and entered into some ordinary conversation. At length 
I said: 

"Well, but G , what of the purloined letter? I presume 

you have at last made up your mind that there is no such thing 
as overreaching the minister? " 

"Confound him, say I — yes; I made the re-examination, 
however, as Dupin suggested — but it was all labor lost, as I 
knew it would be." 

"How much was the reward offered, did you say?" asked 
Dupin. 

"Why, a very great deal — a very liberal reward — I don't 
like to say how much, precisely; but one thing I will say, that I 
would n't mind giving my individual check for fifty thousand 
francs to any one who could obtain me that letter. The fact is, 
it is becoming of more and more importance every day; and 
the reward has been lately doubled. If it were trebled, how- 
ever, I could do no more than I have done." 

"Why, yes," said Dupin, drawlingly, between the whiffs of 



182 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

his meerschaum, "I really — think, G , you have not ex- 
erted yourself — to the utmost in this matter. You might — 
do a little more, I think, eh?" 

"How? — in what way?" 

"Why — puff, puff — you might — puff, puff — employ 
counsel in the matter, eh? — puff, puff, puff. Do you remem- 
ber the story they tell of Abernethy?" x 

" No ; hang Abernethy ! ' ' 

"To be sure! hang him and welcome. But, once upon a 
time, a certain rich miser conceived the design of sponging 
upon this Abernethy for a medical opinion. Getting up, for 
this purpose, an ordinary conversation in a private company, 
he insinuated the case to his physician as that of an imaginary 
individual. 

"'We will suppose/ said the miser, 'that his symptoms are 
such and such; now, doctor, what would you have directed 
him to take?' 

"'Take!' said Abernethy, 'why, take advice, to be sure.'" 

"But," said the Prefect, a little discomposed, "I am per- 
fectly willing to take advice, and to pay for it. I would really 
give fifty thousand francs to any who would aid me in the 
matter." 

"In that case," replied Dupin, opening a drawer, and pro- 
ducing a check-book, "you may as well fill me up a check for 
the amount mentioned. When' you have signed it, I will hand 
you the letter." 

I was astounded. The Prefect appeared absolutely thunder- 
stricken. For some minutes he remained speechless and mo- 
tionless, looking incredulously at my friend with open mouth, 
and eyes that seemed starting from their sockets; then, appar- 
ently recovering himself in some measure, he seized a pen, and 
after several pauses and vacant stares, finally filled up and 
signed a check for fifty thousand francs, and handed it across 
the table to Dupin. The latter examined it carefully and de- 
posited it in his pocket-book; then, unlocking an escritoire, took 
thence a letter and gave it to the Prefect. This functionary 
grasped it in a perfect agony of joy, opened it with a trembling 
hand, cast a rapid glance at its contents, and then scrambling 
and struggling to the door, rushed at length unceremoniously 
1 John Abernethy (1764-1831), a distinguished London surgeon. 



THE PURLOINED LETTER 183 

from the room and from the house, without having uttered a 
syllable since Dupin had requested him to fill up the check- 
When he had gone my friend entered into some explanations. 
"The Parisian police," he said, "are exceedingly able in their 
way. They are persevering, ingenious, cunning, and thoroughly 
versed in the knowledge which their duties seem chiefly to 
demand. Thus, when G detailed to us his mode of search- 
ing the premises at the Hotel D , I felt entire confidence 

in his having made a satisfactory investigation — so far as his 
labors extended." 

"So far as his labors extended?" said I. 
"Yes," said Dupin. "The measures adopted were not only 
the best of their kind, but carried out to absolute perfection. 
Had the letter been deposited within the range of their search, 
these fellows would, beyond question, have found it." 

I merely laughed, but he seemed quite serious in all that he 
said. 

"The measures, then," he continued, "were good in their 
kind, and well executed; their defect lay in their being inap- 
plicable to the case, and to the man. A certain set of highly- 
ingenious resources are with the Prefect a sort of Procrustean 
bed, to which he forcibly adapts his designs. But he perpetu- 
ally errs by being too deep or too shallow for the matter in 
hand, and many a schoolboy is a better reasoner than he. I 
knew one about eight years of age, whose success at guessing 
in the game of ' even and odd ' attracted universal admiration. 
This game is simple, and is played with marbles. One player 
holds in his hand a number of these toys, and demands of 
another whether that number is even or odd. If the guess is 
right the guesser wins one, if wrong, he loses one. The boy to 
whom I allude won all the marbles of the school. Of course he 
had some principle of guessing, and this lay in mere observa- 
tion and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents. 
For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and holding 
up his closed hand asks, ' are they even or odd? ' Our schoolboy 
replies 'odd,' and loses, but upon the second trial he wins, for 
he then says to himself, ' the simpleton had them even upon the 
first trial, and his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make 
him have them odd upon the second, I will therefore guess 
odd'; he guesses odd, and wins. Now, with a simpleton a 



184 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

degree above the first he would have reasoned thus: 'This fel- 
low finds that in the first instance I guessed odd, and in the 
second he will propose to himself upon the first impulse, a 
simple variation from even to odd, as did the first simpleton, 
but then a second thought will suggest that this is too simple 
a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting it even as 
before. I will therefore guess even'; he guesses even, and wins. 
Now, this mode of reasoning in the schoolboy, whom his fel- 
lows termed 'lucky,' what in its last analysis is it?" 

"It is merely," I said, "an identification of the reasoner's 
intellect with that of his opponent." 

"It is," said Dupin, "and upon inquiring of the boy by 
what means he effected the thorough identification in which 
his success consisted, I received answer as follows: 'When 
I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or 
how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, 
I fashion the expression of my face as accurately as possible 
in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to 
see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, 
as if to match or correspond with the expression.' This re- 
sponse of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious 
profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucauld, to La 
Bruyere, to Machiavelli, and to Campanella." 

"And the identification," I said, "of the reasoner's intellect 
with that of his opponent depends, if I understand you aright, 
upon the accuracy with which the opponent's intellect is ad- 
measured." 

" For its practical value it depends upon this," replied Dupin; 
"and the Prefect and his cohort fail so frequently, first, by 
default of this identification, and secondly, by ill-admeasure- 
ment, or rather through non-admeasurement of the intellect 
with which they are engaged. They consider only their own 
ideas of ingenuity; and in searching for anything hidden, 
advert only to the modes in which they would have hidden it. 
They are right in this much — that their own ingenuity is a 
faithful representative of that of the mass; but when the cun- 
ning of the individual felon is diverse in character from their 
own, the felon foils them of course. This always happens when 
it is above their own, and very usually when it is below. They 
have no variation of principle in their investigations; at best, 



THE PURLOINED LETTER 185 

when urged by some unusual emergency, by some extraordinary 
reward, they extend or exaggerate their old modes of practice, 
without touching their principles. What, for example, in this 

case of D has been done to vary the principle of action? 

What is all this boring, and probing, and sounding, and scru- 
tinizing with the microscope, and dividing the surface of the 
building into registered square inches — what is it all but an 
exaggeration of the application of the one principle or set of 
principles of search, which are based upon the one set of 
notions regarding human ingenuity, to which the Prefect in the 
long routine of his duty has been accustomed? Do you not 
see he has taken it for granted that all men proceed to conceal 
a letter — not exactly in a gimlet-hole bored in a chair-leg — 
but, at least, in some out-of-the-way hole or corner suggested 
by the same tenor of thought which would urge a man to secrete 
a letter in a gimlet-hole bored in a chair-leg? And do you not 
see also that such recherches nooks for concealment are adapted 
only for ordinary occasions, and would be adopted only by 
ordinary intellects, for, in all cases of concealment, a disposal 
of the article concealed, a disposal of it in this recherche man- 
ner, is in the very first instance presumable and presumed, and 
thus its discovery depends, not at all upon the acumen, but 
altogether upon the mere care, patience, and determination of 
the seekers, and where the case is of importance, or what 
amounts to the same thing in the policial eyes, when the 
reward is of magnitude, the qualities in question have never 
been known to fail? You will now understand what I meant 
in suggesting that had the purloined letter been hidden any- 
where within the limits of the Prefect's examination — in other 
words, had the principle of its concealment been comprehended 
within the principles of the Prefect — its discovery would have 
been a matter altogether beyond question. This functionary, 
however, has been thoroughly mystified, and the remote source 
of his defeat lies in the supposition that the Minister is a fool 
because he has acquired renown as a poet. All fools are poets, 
this the Vreiect feels, and he is merely guilty of a non distributio 
medii 1 in thence inferring that all poets are fools." 

"But is this really the poet?" I asked. "There are two 

brothers, I know, and both have attained reputation in letters. 

1 A certain type of error in logic, — the " fallacy of the undistributed middle." 



186 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

The minister, I believe, has written learnedly on the Differen- 
tial Calculus. He is a mathematician and no poet." 

"You are mistaken; I know him well; he is both. As poet 
and mathematician he would reason well; as mere mathema- 
tician he could not have reasoned at all, and thus would have 
been at the mercy of the Prefect." 

"You surprise me," I said, "by these opinions, which have 
been contradicted by the voice of the world. You do not mean 
to set at naught the well-digested idea of centuries. The mathe- 
matical reason has long been regarded as the reason par 
excellence." 

tlt Il y a a parier,'" replied Dupin, quoting from Chamfort, 1 
"'que toute idee publique, toute convention reque, est une sottise, 
car elle a convenu au plus grand nombre.' The mathematicians, 
I grant you, have done their best to promulgate the popular 
error to which you allude, and which is none the less an error 
for its promulgation as truth. With an art worthy a better 
cause, for example, they have insinuated the term 'analysis' 
into application to algebra. The French are the originators of 
this particular deception, but if a term is of any importance, if 
words derive any value from applicability, then ' analysis ' con- 
veys 'algebra' about as much as, in Latin, 'ambitus'' implies 
'ambition,' 'religio,' 'religion,' or 'homines honesti,' a set of 
honorable men." 

"You have a quarrel on hand, I see," said I, "with some of 
the algebraists of Paris — but proceed." 

"I dispute the availability, and thus the value of that reason 
which is cultivated in any especial form other than the ab- 
stractly logical. I dispute in particular the reason educed by 
mathematical study. The mathematics are the science of form 
and quantity, mathematical reasoning is merely logic applied 
to observation upon form and quantity. The great error lies 
in supposing that even the truths of what is called pure algebra 
are abstract or general truths. And this error is so egregious 
that I am confounded at the universality with which it has 
been received. Mathematical axioms are not axioms of general 
truth. What is true of relation — of form and quantity — is 

1 Sebastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort (1741-1794), a French writer. "It is a' 
good wager that every public idea, every accepted convention, is folly, because it 
has been agreeable to the majority." 



THE PURLOINED LETTER 187 

often grossly false in regard to morals, for example. In this 
latter science it is very usually untrue that the aggregated 
parts are equal to the whole. In chemistry also the axiom fails. 
In the consideration of motive it fails, for two motives, each of 
a given value, have not necessarily a value when united equal 
to the sum of their values apart. There are numerous other 
mathematical truths which are only truths within the limits of 
relation. But the mathematician argues from his finite truths, 
through habit, as if they were of an absolutely general appli- 
cability — as the world indeed imagines them to be. Bryant, 1 
in his very learned Mythology, mentions an analogous source 
of error, when he says that ' although the Pagan fables are not 
believed, yet we forget ourselves continually, and make infer- 
ences from them as existing realities.' With the algebraists, 
however, who are Pagans themselves, the 'Pagan fables' are 
believed, and the inferences are made, not so much through 
lapse of memory as through an unaccountable addling of the 
brains. In short, I never yet encountered the mere mathema- 
tician who could be trusted out of equal roots, or one who did 
not clandestinely hold it as a point of his faith that x 2 + px was 
absolutely and unconditionally equal to q. Say to one of these 
gentlemen, by way of experiment, if you please, that you 
believe occasions may occur where x 2 + px is not altogether 
equal to q, and having made him understand what you mean, 
get out of his reach as speedily as convenient, for beyond 
doubt he will endeavor to knock you down. 

"I mean to say," continued Dupin, while I merely laughed 
at his last observations, "that if the minister had been no more 
than a mathematician, the Prefect would have been under no 
necessity of giving me this check. I knew him, however, as 
both mathematician and poet, and my measures were adapted 
to his capacity, with reference to the circumstances by which he 
was surrounded. I knew him as a courtier, too, and as a bold 
intrigant. Such a man, I considered, could not fail to be 
aware of the ordinary policial modes of action. He could not 
have failed to anticipate — and events have proved that he did 
not fail to anticipate — the waylayings to which he was sub- 
jected. He must have foreseen, I reflected, the secret investi- 
gations of his premises. His frequent absences from home at 

1 Jacob Bryant, an eighteenth-century antiquary. 



188 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

night, which were hailed by the Prefect as certain aids to his 
success, I regarded only as ruses, to afford opportunity for 
thorough search to the police, and thus the sooner to impress 

them with the conviction to which G , in fact, did finally 

arrive — the conviction that the letter was not upon the prem- 
ises. I felt, also, that the whole train of thought which I was 
at some pains in detailing to you just now, concerning the 
invariable principle of policial action in searches for articles 
concealed — I felt that this whole train of thought would 
necessarily pass through the mind of the minister. It would 
imperatively lead him to despise all the ordinary nooks of con- 
cealment. He could not, I reflected, be so weak as not to see 
that the most intricate and remote recess of his hotel would be 
as open as his commonest closets to the eyes, to the probes, 
to the gimlets, and to the microscopes of the Prefect. I saw, 
in fine, that he would be driven, as a matter of course, to sim- 
plicity, if not deliberately induced to it as a matter of choice. 
You will remember, perhaps, how desperately the Prefect 
laughed when I suggested, upon our first interview, that it was 
just possible this mystery troubled him so much on account 
of its being so very self-evident." 

"Yes," said I, "I remember his merriment well. I really 
thought he would have fallen into convulsions." 

"The material world," continued Dupin, "abounds with 
very strict analogies to the immaterial; and thus some color of 
truth has been given to the rhetorical dogma that metaphor or 
simile may be made to strengthen an argument as well as to 
embellish a description. The principle of the vis inertias, for 
example, seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It 
is not more true in the former that a large body is with more 
difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subse- 
quent momentum is commensurate with this difficulty, than it 
is, in the latter, that intellects of the vaster capacity, while 
more forcible, more constant, and more eventful in their move- 
ments than those of inferior grade, are yet the less readily 
moved, and more embarrassed and full of hesitation in the first 
few steps of their progress. Again; have you ever noticed 
which of the street signs over the shop-doors are the most 
attractive of attention?" 

"I have never given the matter a thought," I said. 



THE PURLOINED LETTER 189 

"There is a game of puzzles," he resumed, "which is played 
upon a map. One party playing requires another to find a 
given word — the name of town, river, state, or empire — any 
word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the 
chart. A novice in the game generally seeks to embarrass his 
opponents by giving them the most minutely lettered names, 
but the adept selects such words as stretch, in large characters, 
from one end of the chart to the other. These, like the over- 
largely lettered signs and placards of the street, escape obser- 
vation by dint of being excessively obvious; and here the 
physical oversight is precisely analogous with the moral inap- 
prehension by which the intellect suffers to pass unnoticed 
those considerations which are too obtrusively and too palpably 
self-evident. But this is a point, it appears, somewhat above or 
beneath the understanding of the Prefect. He never once 
thought it probable, or possible, that the minister had de- 
posited the letter immediately beneath the nose of the whole 
world, by way of best preventing any portion of that world 
from perceiving it. 

"But the more I reflected upon the daring, dashing, and dis- 
criminating ingenuity of D ; upon the fact that the docu- 
ment must always have been at hand if he intended to use it 
to good purpose; and upon the decisive evidence, obtained 
by the Prefect, that it was not hidden within the limits of that 
dignitary's ordinary search — the more satisfied I became that, 
to conceal this letter, the minister had resorted to the compre- 
hensive and sagacious expedient of not attempting to conceal it 
at all. 

"Full of these ideas, I prepared myself with a pair of green 
spectacles, and called one fine morning, quite by accident, at 
the ministerial hotel. I found D at home, yawning, loung- 
ing, and dawdling, as usual, and pretending to be in the last 
extremity of ennui. He is, perhaps, the most really energetic 
human being now alive — but that is only when nobody sees 
him. 

"To be even with him, I complained of my weak eyes, and 
lamented the necessity of the spectacles, under cover of which 
I cautiously and thoroughly surveyed the whole apartment, 
while seemingly intent only upon 4he conversation of my host. 

"I paid especial attention to a large writing-table near which 



iqo EDGAR ALLAN POE 

he sat, and upon which lay confusedly some miscellaneous let- 
ters and other papers, with one or two musical instruments and 
a few books. Here, however, after a long and very deliberate 
scrutiny, I saw nothing to excite particular suspicion. 

"At length my eyes, in going the circuit of the room, fell 
upon a trumpery filigree card-rack of pasteboard that hung 
dangling by a dirty blue ribbon from a little brass knob just 
beneath the middle of the mantelpiece. In this rack, which 
had three or four compartments, were five or six visiting cards 
and a solitary letter. This last was much soiled and crumpled. 
It was torn nearly in two, across the middle — as if a design, in 
the first instance, to tear it entirely up as worthless, had been 
altered, or stayed, in the second. It had a large black seal, 
bearing the D cipher very conspicuously, and was ad- 
dressed, in a diminutive female hand, to D , the minister, 

himself. It was thrust carelessly, and even, as it seemed, con- 
temptuously, into one of the uppermost divisions of the rack. 

"No sooner had I glanced at this letter than I concluded it 
to be that of which I was in search. To be sure, it was to all 
appearance radically different from the one of which the 
Prefect had read us so minute a description. Here the seal 

was large and black, with the D cipher; there it was small 

and red, with the ducal arms of the S family. Here the 

address, to the minister, was diminutive and feminine; there 
the superscription, to a certain royal personage, was markedly 
bold and decided; the size alone formed a point of correspond- 
ence. But, then, the radicalness of these differences, which was 
excessive; the dirt; the soiled and torn condition of the paper, 

so inconsistent with the true methodical habits of D , and 

so suggestive of a design to delude the beholder into an idea 
of the worthlessness of the document; these things, together 
with the hyper-obtrusive situation of this document, full in 
the view of every visitor, and thus exactly in accordance with 
the conclusions to which I had previously arrived: these 
things, I say, were strongly corroborative of suspicion in one 
who came with the intention to suspect. 

"I protracted my visit as long as possible, and while I main- 
tained a most animated discussion with the minister upon 
a topic which I knew well bad never failed to interest and 
excite him, I kept my attention really riveted upon the letter '. 



THE PURLOINED LETTER 191 

In this examination I committed to memory its external 
appearance and arrangement in the rack; and also fell, at 
length, upon a discovery which set at rest whatever trivial 
doubt I might have entertained. In scrutinizing the edges of 
the paper I observed them to be more chafed than seemed 
necessary. They presented the broken appearance which is 
manifested when a stiff paper, having been once folded and 
pressed with a folder, is refolded in a reversed direction, in the 
same creases or edges which had formed the original fold. 
This discovery was sufficient. It was clear to me that the 
letter had been turned as a glove, inside out, re-directed and 
re-sealed. I bade the minister good morning and took my 
departure at once, leaving a gold snuff-box upon the table. 

"The next morning I called for the snuff-box, when we 
resumed quite eagerly the conversation of the preceding day. 
While thus engaged, however, a loud report as if of a pistol, 
was heard immediately beneath the windows of the hotel, and 
was succeeded by a series of fearful screams, and the shoutings 

of a terrified mob. D rushed to a casement, threw it 

open, and looked out. In the mean time I stepped to the card- 
rack, took the letter, put it in my pocket, and replaced it by a 
facsimile (so far as regards externals), which I had carefully 

prepared at my lodgings — imitating the D cipher very 

readily by means of a seal formed of bread. 

"The disturbance in the street had been occasioned by the 
frantic behavior of a man with a musket. He had fired it among 
a crowd of women and children. It proved, however, to have 
been without ball, and the fellow was suffered to go his way 

as a lunatic or a drunkard. When he had gone, D came 

from the window, whither I had followed him immediately 
upon securing the object in view. Soon afterwards I bade him 
farewell. The pretended lunatic was a man in my own pay." 

"But what purpose had you," I asked, "in replacing the 
letter by a facsimile ? Would it not have been better at the 
first visit to have seized it openly, and departed?" 

"D ," replied Dupin, "is a desperate man and a man of 

nerve. His hotel, too, is not without attendants devoted to his 
interests. Had I made the wild attempt you suggest I might 
never have left the ministerial presence alive. The good people 
of Paris might have heard of me no more. But I had an object 



i 9 2 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

apart from these considerations. You know my political pre- 
possessions. In this matter, I act as a partisan of the lady 
concerned. For eighteen months the minister has Had her in 
his power. She has now him in hers — since, being unaware 
that the letter is not in his possession, he will proceed with his 
exactions as if it was. Thus will he inevitably commit himself 
at once to his political destruction. His downfall, too, will not 
be more precipitate than awkward. It is all very well to talk 
about the facilis descensus Averni, 1 but in all kinds of climbing, 
as Catalani 2 said of singing, it is far more easy to get up than 
to come down. In the present instance I have no sympathy 
— at least no pity — for him who descends. He is that mon- 
strum horrendum, 3 an unprincipled man of genius. I confess, 
however, that I should like very well to know the precise 
character of his thoughts, when, being defied by her whom the 
Prefect terms 'a certain personage,' he is reduced to opening 
the letter which I left for him in the card-rack." 
"How? did you put anything particular in it?" 
"Why — it did not seem altogether right to leave the 

interior blank — that would have been insulting. D , at 

Vienna, once did me an evil turn, which I told him, quite 
good-humoredly, that I should remember. So, as I knew he 
would feel some curiosity in regard to the identity of the per- 
son who had outwitted him, I thought it a pity not to give 
him a clue. He is well acquainted with my manuscript, and I 
just copied into the middle of the blank sheet the words — 

' Un dessein si funeste, 

S'il n'est digne d'Atree, est digne de Thyeste.' 4 

They are to be found in Crebillon's Atree." 

1 "Easy is the descent to Hades." (Virgil's Mneid.) 

2 A renowned Italian singer. 

3 "Horrible monster." (Virgil's Mneid.) 

4 " So dark a design that, if it is not worthy of Atreus, it is worthy of Thy- 
estes." The design of Thyestes, who seduced the wife of his brother Atreus and 
planned his death, was dark; darker yet was that of Atreus, who slew three sons 
of Thyestes and served them to him at table. 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

THE WEDDING KNELL 1 

There is a certain church in the city of New York which I 
have always regarded with peculiar interest, on account of a 
marriage there solemnized, under very singular circumstances, 
in my grandmother's girlhood. That venerable lady chanced 
to be a spectator of the scene, and ever after made it her favor- 
ite narrative. Whether the edifice now standing on the same 
site be the identical one to which she referred, I am not anti- 
quarian enough to know; nor would it be worth while to correct 
myself, perhaps, of an agreeable error, by reading the date of 
its erection on the tablet over the door. It is a stately church, 
surrounded by an inclosure of the loveliest green, within which 
appear urns, pillars, obelisks, and other forms of monumental 
marble, the tributes of private affection, or more splendid 
memorials of historic dust. With such a place, though the 
tumult of the city rolls beneath its tower, one would be willing 
to connect some legendary interest. 

The marriage might be considered as the result of an early 

1 Twice-Told Tales. Most of the tales were written in a "dismal chamber" 
in the second story of a house on Herbert Street, Salem. "These stories were 
published in magazines and annuals," says Hawthorne, "extending over a 
period of ten or twelve years, and comprising the whole of the writer's young 
manhood." In 1837 they were published as a book, the title of which was sug- 
gested by a line in King John, — 

" Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale." 

Hawthorne's own comment on these stories contains the following penetrating, 
if not very sympathetic passage: "They have the pale tint of flowers that blos- 
somed in too retired a shade, — the coolness of a meditative habit, which diffuses 
itself through the feeling and observation of every sketch. Instead of passion 
there is sentiment; and, even in what purport to be pictures of actual life, we 
have allegory, not always so warmly dressed in its habiliments of flesh and blood 
as to be taken into the reader's mind without a shiver. Whether from lack of 
power, or an unconquerable reserve, the Author's touches have often an effect 
of tameness; the merriest man can hardly contrive to laugh at his broadest 
humor; the tenderest woman, one would suppose, will hardly shed warm tears 
at his deepest pathos. The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be 
read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened 
in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages." 



i 9 4 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

engagement, though there had been two intermediate weddings 
on the lady's part, and forty years of celibacy on that of the 
gentleman. At sixty-five, Mr. Ellenwood was a shy, but not 
quite a secluded man; selfish, like all men who brood over their 
own hearts, yet manifesting on rare occasions a vein of gener- 
ous sentiment; a scholar throughout life, though always an 
indolent one, because his studies had no definite object, either 
of public advantage or personal ambition; a gentleman, high 
bred and fastidiously delicate, yet sometimes requiring a con- 
siderable relaxation, in his behalf, of the common rules of 
society. In truth, there were so many anomalies in his charac- 
ter, and though shrinking with diseased sensibility from public 
notice, it had been his fatality so often to become the topic of 
the day, by some wild eccentricity of conduct, that people 
searched his lineage for an hereditary taint of insanity. But 
there was no need of this. His caprices had their origin in a 
mind that lacked the support of an engrossing purpose, and in 
feelings that preyed upon themselves for want of other food. 
If he were mad, it was the consequence, and not the cause, of an 
aimless and abortive life. 

The widow was as complete a contrast to her third bride- 
groom, in everything but age, as can well be conceived. Com- 
pelled to relinquish her first engagement, she had been united 
to a man of twice her own years, to whom she became an 
exemplary wife, and by whose death she was left in possession 
of a splendid fortune. A Southern gentleman, considerably 
younger than herself, succeeded to her hand, and carried her 
to Charleston, where, after many uncomfortable years, she 
found herself again a widow. It would have been singular, 
if any uncommon delicacy of feeling had survived through such 
a life as Mrs. Dabney's; it could not but be crushed and killed 
by her early disappointment, the cold duty of her first marriage, 
the dislocation of the heart's principles, consequent on a second 
union, and the unkindness of her Southern husband, which 
had inevitably driven her to connect the idea of his death with 
that of her comfort. To be brief, she was that wisest, but un- 
loveliest, variety of woman, a philosopher, bearing troubles of 
the heart with equanimity, dispensing with all that should have 
been her happiness, and making the best of what remained. 
Sage in most matters, the widow was perhaps the more amia- 



THE WEDDING KNELL 195 

ble for the one frailty that made her ridiculous. Being child- 
less, she could not remain beautiful by proxy, in the person of 
a daughter; she therefore refused to grow old and ugly, on any 
consideration ; she struggled with Time, and held fast her roses 
in spite of him, till the venerable thief appeared to have relin- 
quished the spoil, as not worth the trouble of acquiring it. 

The approaching marriage of this woman of the world with 
such an unworldly man as Mr. Ellenwood was announced soon 
after Mrs. Dabney's return to her native city. Superficial 
observers, and deeper ones, seemed to concur in supposing that 
the lady must have borne no inactive part in arranging the 
affair; there were considerations of expediency which she would 
be far more likely to appreciate than Mr. Ellenwood ; and there 
was just the specious phantom of sentiment and romance in 
this late union of two early lovers which sometimes makes a 
fool of a woman who has lost her true feelings among the 
accidents of life. All the wonder was, how the gentleman, with 
his lack of worldly wisdom and agonizing consciousness of 
ridicule, could have been induced to take a measure at once 
so prudent and so laughable. But while people talked the 
wedding-day arrived. The ceremony was to be solemnized 
according to the Episcopalian forms, and in open church, with 
a degree of publicity that attracted many spectators, who 
occupied the front seats of the galleries, and the pews near the 
altar and along the broad aisle. It had been arranged, or possi- 
bly it was the custom of the day, that the parties should pro- 
ceed separately to church. By some accident the bridegroom 
was a little less punctual than the widow and her bridal attend- 
ants; with whose arrival, after this tedious, but necessary 
preface, the action of our tale may be said to commence. 

The clumsy wheels of several old-fashioned coaches were 
heard, and the gentlemen and ladies composing the bridal 
party came through the church door with the sudden and glad- 
some effect of a burst of sunshine. The whole group, except 
the principal figure, was made up of youth and gayety. As 
they streamed up the broad aisle, while the pews and pillars 
seemed to brighten on either side, their steps were as buoyant 
as if they mistook the church for a ball-room, and were ready 
to dance hand in hand to the altar. So brilliant was the specta- 
cle that few took notice of a singular phenomenon that had 



196 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

marked its entrance. At the moment when the bride's foot 
touched the threshold the bell swung heavily in the tower 
above her, and sent forth its deepest knell. The vibrations died 
away and returned with prolonged solemnity, as she entered 
the body of the church. 

"Good heavens! what an omen," whispered a young lady to 
her lover. 

"On my honor," replied the gentleman, "I believe the bell 
has the good taste to toll of its own accord. What has she to 
do with weddings? If you, dearest Julia, were approaching the 
altar the bell would ring out its merriest peal. It has only a 
funeral knell for her." 

The bride and most of her company had been too much 
occupied with the bustle of entrance to hear the first boding 
stroke of the bell, or at least to reflect on the singularity of such 
a welcome to the altar. They therefore continued to advance 
with undiminished gayety. The gorgeous dresses of the time, 
the crimson velvet coats, the gold-laced hats, the hoop petti- 
coats, the silk, satin, brocade, and embroidery, the buckles, 
canes, and swords, all displayed to the best advantage on 
persons suited to such finery, made the group appear more like 
a bright-colored picture than anything real. But by what per- 
versity of taste had the artist represented his principal figure 
as so wrinkled and decayed, while yet he had decked her out in 
the brightest splendor of attire, as if the loveliest maiden had 
suddenly withered into age, and become a moral to the beauti- 
ful around her! On they went, however, and had glittered 
along about a third of the aisle, when another stroke of the 
bell seemed to fill the church with a visible gloom, dimming 
and obscuring the bright pageant, till it shone forth again as 
from a mist. 

This time the party wavered, stopped, and huddled closer 
together, while a slight scream was heard from some of the 
ladies, and a confused whispering among the gentlemen. Thus 
tossing to and fro, they might have been fancifully compared 
to a splendid bunch of flowers, suddenly shaken by a puff of 
wind, which threatened to scatter the leaves of an old, brown, 
withered rose, on the same stalk with two dewy buds, — such 
being the emblem of the widow between her fair young bride- 
maids. But her heroism was admirable. She had started with 



THE WEDDING KNELL 197 

an irrepressible shudder, as if the stroke of the bell had fallen 
directly on her heart ; then, recovering herself, while her attend- 
ants were yet in dismay, she took the lead, and paced calmly 
up the aisle. The bell continued to swing, strike, and vibrate, 
with the same doleful regularity as when a corpse is on its way 
to the tomb. 

"My young friends here have their nerves a little shaken," 
said the widow, with a smile, to the clergyman at the altar. 
" But so many weddings have been ushered in with the merriest 
peal of the bells, and yet turned out unhappily, that I shall 
hope for better fortune under such different auspices." 

"Madam," answered the rector, in great perplexity, "this 
strange occurrence brings to my mind a marriage sermon of the 
famous Bishop Taylor, wherein he mingles so many thoughts of 
mortality and future woe, that, to speak somewhat after his 
own rich style, he seems to hang the bridal chamber in black, 
and cut the wedding garment out of a coffin pall. And it has 
been the custom of divers nations to infuse something of sad- 
ness into their marriage ceremonies, so to keep death in mind 
while contracting that engagement which is life's chiefest 
business. Thus we may draw a sad but profitable moral from 
this funeral knell." 

But, though the clergyman might have given his moral even 
a keener point, he did not fail to dispatch an attendant to in- 
quire into the mystery, and stop those sounds, so dismally 
appropriate to such a marriage. A brief space elapsed, during 
which the silence was broken only by whispers, and a few sup- 
pressed titterings, among the wedding party and the spectators, 
who, after the first shock, were disposed to draw an ill-natured 
merriment from the affair. The young have less charity for 
aged follies than the old for those of youth. The widow's 
glance was observed to wander, for an instant, towards a 
window of the church, as if searching for the time-worn marble 
that she had dedicated to her first husband; then her eyelids 
dropped over their faded orbs, and her thoughts were drawn 
irresistibly to another grave. Two buried men, with a voice at 
her ear, and a cry afar off, were calling her to lie down beside 
them. Perhaps, with momentary truth of feeling, she thought 
how much happier had been her fate, if, after years of bliss, the 
bell were now tolling for her funeral, and she were followed to 



i 9 8 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

the grave by the old affection of her earliest lover, long her 
husband. But why had she returned to him, when their cold 
hearts shrank from each other's embrace? 

Still the death-bell tolled so mournfully, that the sunshine 
seemed to fade in the air. A whisper, communicated from those 
who stood nearest the windows, now spread through the 
church; a hearse, with a train of several coaches, was creeping 
along the street, conveying some dead man to the churchyard, 
while the bride awaited a living one at the altar. Immedi- 
ately after, the footsteps of the bridegroom and his friends 
were heard at the door. The widow looked down the aisle, 
and clinched the arm of one of her bridemaids in her bony hand 
with such unconscious violence, that the fair girl trembled. 

"You frighten me, my dear madam!" cried she. "For 
Heaven's sake, what is the matter?" 

"Nothing, my dear, nothing," said the widow; then, whisper- 
ing close to her ear, "There is a foolish fancy that I cannot get 
rid of. I am expecting my bridegroom to come into the church, 
with my first two husbands for groomsmen!" 

"Look, look!" screamed the bridemaid. "What is here? 
The funeral!" 

As she spoke, a dark procession paced into the church. First 
came an old man and woman, like chief mourners at a funeral, 
attired from head to foot in the deepest black, all but their 
pale features and hoary hair; he leaning on a staff, and sup- 
porting her decrepit form with his nerveless arm. Behind 
appeared another, and another pair, as aged, as black, and 
mournful as the first. As they drew near, the widow recognized 
in every face some trait of former friends, long forgotten, but 
now returning, as if from their old graves, to warn her to pre- 
pare a shroud; or, with purpose almost as unwelcome, to ex- 
hibit their wrinkles and infirmity, and claim her as their com- 
panion by the tokens of her own decay. Many a merry night 
had she danced with them, in youth. And now, in joyless age, 
she felt that some withered partner should request her hand, 
and all unite, in a dance of death, to the music of the funeral 
bell. 

While these aged mourners were passing up the aisle, it was 
observed that, from pew to pew, the spectators shuddered with 
irrepressible awe, as some object, hitherto concealed by the in- 



THE WEDDING KNELL 199 

tervening figures, came full in sight. Many turned away their 
faces; others kept a fixed and rigid stare; and a young girl 
giggled hysterically, and fainted with the laughter on her lips. 
When the spectral procession approached the altar, each 
couple separated, and slowly diverged, till, in the centre, 
appeared a form, that had been worthily ushered in with all 
this gloomy pomp, the death knell, and the funeral. It was the 
bridegroom in his shroud! 

No garb but that of the grave could have befitted such a 
deathlike aspect; the eyes, indeed, had the wild gleam of a 
sepulchral lamp; all else was fixed in the stern calmness which 
old men wear in the coffin. The corpse stood motionless, but 
addressed the widow in accents that seemed to melt into the 
clang of the bell, which fell heavily on the air while he spoke. 

" Come, my bride ! " said those pale lips, " the hearse is ready. 
The sexton stands waiting for us at the door of the tomb. Let 
us be married; and then to our coffins!" 

How shall the widow's horror be represented? It gave her 
the ghastliness of a dead man's bride. Her youthful friends 
stood apart, shuddering at the mourners, the shrouded bride- 
groom, and herself; the whole scene expressed, by the strong- 
est imagery, the vain struggle of the gilded vanities of this 
world, when opposed to age, infirmity, sorrow, and death. 
The awe-struck silence was first broken by the clergyman. 

"Mr. Ellenwood," said he, soothingly, yet with somewhat 
of authority, "you are not well. Your mind has been agitated 
by the unusual circumstances in which you are placed. The 
ceremony must be deferred. As an old friend, let me entreat you 
to return home." 

"Home! yes, but not without my bride," answered he, in the 
same hollow accents. "You deem this mockery; perhaps mad- 
ness. Had I bedizened my aged and broken frame with scarlet 
and embroidery — had I forced my withered lips to smile at 
my dead heart — that might have been mockery, or madness. 
But now, let young and old declare, which of us has come hither 
without a wedding garment, the bridegroom or the bride!" 

He stepped forward at a ghostly pace, and stood beside the 
widow, contrasting the awful simplicity of his shroud with the 
glare and glitter in which she had arrayed herself for this un- 
happy scene. None, that beheld them, could deny the terrible 



200 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

strength of the moral which his disordered intellect had con- 
trived to draw. 

"Cruel! cruel!" groaned the heart-stricken bride. 

"Cruel!" repeated he; then, losing his deathlike composure 
in a wild bitterness: "Heaven judge which of us has been cruel 
to the other ! In youth you deprived me of my happiness, my 
hopes, my aims; you took away all the substance of my life, 
and made it a dream without reality enough even to grieve at 
— with only a pervading gloom, through which I walked 
wearily, and cared not whither. But after forty years, when I 
have built my tomb, and would not give up the thought of 
resting there — no, not for such a life as we once pictured — 
you call me to the altar. At your summons I am here. But 
other husbands have enjoyed your youth, your beauty, your 
warmth of heart, and all that could be termed your life. What 
is there for me but your decay and death? And therefore I 
have bidden these funeral friends, and bespoken the sexton's 
deepest knell, and am come, in my shroud, to wed you, as with 
a burial service, that we may join our hands at the door of the 
sepulchre, and enter it together." 

It was not frenzy; it was not merely the drunkenness of 
strong emotion, in a heart unused to it, that now wrought upon 
the bride. The stern lesson of the day had done its work; her 
worldliness was gone. She seized the bridegroom's hand. 

"Yes!" cried she. "Let us wed, even at the door of the 
sepulchre ! My life is gone in vanity and emptiness. But at its 
close there is one true feeling. It has made me what I was in 
youth; it makes me worthy of you. Time is no more for both 
of us. Let us wed for Eternity!" 

With a long and deep regard, the bridegroom looked into her 
eyes, while a tear was gathering in his own. How strange that 
gush of human feeling from the frozen bosom of a corpse ! He 
wiped away the tears even with his shroud. 

"Beloved of my youth," said he, "I have been wild. The 
despair of my whole lifetime had returned at once, and mad- 
dened me. Forgive; and be forgiven. Yes, it is evening with us 
now; and we have realized none of our morning dreams of 
happiness. But let us join our hands before the altar, as lovers 
whom adverse circumstances have separated through life, yet 
who meet again as they are leaving it, and find their earthly 



THE MAYPOLE OF MERRY MOUNT 201 

affection changed into something holy as religion. And what 
is Time, to the married of Eternity? " 

Amid the tears of many, and a swell of exalted sentiment, 
in those who felt aright, was solemnized the union of two im- 
mortal souls. The train of withered mourners, the hoary bride- 
groom in his shroud, the pale features of the aged bride, and 
the death-bell tolling through the whole, till its deep voice 
overpowered the marriage words, all marked the funeral of 
earthly hopes. But as the ceremony proceeded, the organ, as 
if stirred by the sympathies of this impressive scene, poured 
forth an anthem, first mingling with the dismal knell, then ris- 
ing to a loftier strain, till the soul looked down upon its woe. 
And when the awful rite was finished, and with cold hand in 
cold hand, the Married of Eternity withdrew, the organ's peal 
of solemn triumph drowned the Wedding Knell. 

THE MAYPOLE OF MERRY MOUNT 1 

There is an admirable foundation for a philosophic romance in the curious 
history of the early settlement of Mount Wollaston, or Merry Mount. In the 
slight sketch here attempted, the facts, recorded on the grave pages of our New 
England annalists, have wrought themselves, almost spontaneously, into a sort 
of allegory. The masques, mummeries, and festive customs, described in the 
text, are in accordance with the manners of the age. Authority on these points 
may be found in Strutt's Book of English Sports and Pastimes. 

Bright were the days at Merry Mount, when the Maypole 
was the banner staff of that gay colony! They who reared it, 
should their banner be triumphant, were to pour sunshine over 
New England's rugged hills, and scatter flower seeds through- 
out the soil. Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire. 
Midsummer eve had come, bringing deep verdure to the forest, 
and roses in her lap, of a more vivid hue than the tender buds 
of Spring. But May, or her mirthful spirit, dwelt all the year 
round at Merry Mount, sporting with the Summer months, 
and revelling with Autumn, and basking in the glow of Win- 
ter's fireside. Through a world of toil and care she flitted with 
a dreamlike smile, and came hither to find a home among the 
lightsome hearts of Merry Mount. 

Never had the Maypole been so gayly decked as at sunset 
on midsummer eve. This venerated emblem was a pine-tree, 

1 Twice-Told Tales. 



202 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

which had preserved the slender grace of youth, while it 
equalled the loftiest height of the old wood monarchs. From 
its top streamed a silken banner, colored like the rainbow. 
Down nearly to the ground the pole was dressed with birchen 
boughs, and others of the liveliest green, and some with silvery 
leaves, fastened by ribbons that fluttered in fantastic knots of 
twenty different colors, but no sad ones. Garden flowers, and 
blossoms of the wilderness, laughed gladly forth amid the ver- 
dure, so fresh and dewy that they must have grown by magic 
on that happy pine-tree. Where this green and flowery splen- 
dor terminated, the shaft of the Maypole was stained with 
the seven brilliant hues of the banner at its top. On the lowest 
green bough hung an abundant wreath of roses, some that had 
been gathered in the sunniest spots of the forest, and others, 
of still richer blush, which the colonists had reared from 
English seed. O, people of the Golden Age, the chief of your 
husbandry was to raise flowers ! 

But what was the wild throng that stood hand in hand about 
the Maypole? It could not be that the fauns and nymphs, 
when driven from their classic groves and homes of ancient 
fable, had sought refuge, as all the persecuted did, in the fresh 
woods of the West. These were Gothic monsters, though per- 
haps of Grecian ancestry. On the shoulders of a comely youth 
uprose the head and branching antlers of a stag; a second, 
human in all other points, had the grim visage of a wolf; a 
third, still with the trunk and limbs of a mortal man, showed 
the beard and horns of a venerable he-goat. There was the 
likeness of a bear erect, brute in all but his hind legs, which 
were adorned with pink silk stockings. And here again, almost 
as wondrous, stood a real bear of the dark forest, lending each 
of his forepaws to the grasp of a human hand, and as ready for 
the dance as any in that circle. His inferior nature rose half 
way, to meet his companions as they stooped. Other faces 
wore the similitude of man or woman, but distorted or extrava- 
gant, with red noses pendulous before their mouths, which 
seemed of awful depth, and stretched from ear to ear in an 
eternal fit of laughter. Here might be seen the Salvage Man, 
well known in heraldry, hairy as a baboon, and girdled with 
green leaves. By his side, a noble figure, but still a counterfeit, 
appeared an Indian hunter, with feathery crest and wampum 



THE MAYPOLE OF MERRY MOUNT 203 

belt. Many of this strange company wore fools-caps, and had 
little bells appended to their garments, tinkling with a silvery 
sound, responsive to the inaudible music of their gleesome 
spirits. Some youths and maidens were of soberer garb, yet 
well maintained their places in the irregular throng by the 
expression of wild revelry upon their features. Such were the 
colonists of Merry Mount, as they stood in the broad smile of 
sunset round their venerated Maypole. 

Had a wanderer, bewildered in the melancholy forest, heard 
their mirth, and stolen a half-affrighted glance, he might have 
fancied them the crew of Comus, some already transformed to 
brutes, some midway between man and beast, and the others 
rioting in the flow of tipsy jollity that foreran the change. But 
a band of Puritans, who watched the scene, invisible themselves, 
compared the masques to those devils and ruined souls with 
whom their superstition peopled the black wilderness. 

Within the ring of monsters appeared the two airiest forms 
that had ever trodden on any more solid footing than a purple 
and golden cloud. One was a youth in glistening apparel, with 
a scarf of the rainbow pattern crosswise on his breast. His 
right hand held a gilded staff, the ensign of high dignity among 
the revellers, and his left grasped the slender fingers of a fair 
maiden, not less gayly decorated than himself. Bright roses 
glowed in contrast with the dark and glossy curls of each, and 
were scattered round their feet, or had sprung up spontane- 
ously there. Behind this lightsome couple, so close to the May- 
pole that its boughs shaded his jovial face, stood the figure of 
an English priest, canonically dressed, yet decked with flowers, 
in heathen fashion, and wearing a chaplet of the native vine 
leaves. By the riot of his rolling eye, and the pagan decorations 
of his holy garb, he seemed the wildest monster there, and the 
very Comus of the crew. 

"Votaries of the Maypole," cried the flower-decked priest, 
"merrily, all day long, have the woods echoed to your mirth. 
But be this your merriest hour, my hearts! Lo, here stand the 
Lord and Lady of the May, whom I, a clerk of Oxford, and 
high priest of Merry Mount, am presently to join in holy matri- 
mony. Up with your nimble spirits, ye morris-dancers, green 
men, and glee maidens, bears and wolves, and horned gentle- 
men! Come; a chorus now, rich with the old mirth of Merry 



204 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

England, and the wilder glee of this fresh forest; and then a 
dance, to show the youthful pair what life is made of, and how 
airily they should go through it! All ye that love the Maypole, 
lend your voices to the nuptial song of the Lord and Lady of 
the May!" 

This wedlock was more serious than most affairs of Merry 
Mount, where jest and delusion, trick and fantasy, kept up a 
continual carnival. The Lord and Lady of the May, though 
their titles must be laid down at sunset, were really and truly 
to be partners for the dance of life, beginning the measure that 
same bright eve. The wreath of roses, that hung from the low- 
est green bough of the Maypole, had been twined for them, and 
would be thrown over both their heads, in symbol of their 
flowery union. When the priest had spoken, therefore, a riot- 
ous uproar burst from the rout of monstrous figures. 

"Begin you the stave, reverend Sir," cried they all; "and 
never did the woods ring to such a merry peal as we of the 
Maypole shall send up!" 

Immediately a prelude of pipe, cithern, and viol, touched 
with practiced minstrelsy, began to play from a neighboring 
thicket, in such a mirthful cadence that the boughs of the 
Maypole quivered to the sound. But the May Lord, he of the 
gilded staff, chancing to look into his Lady's eyes, was wonder 
struck at the almost pensive glance that met his own. 

"Edith, sweet Lady of the May," whispered he reproach- 
fully, "is yon wreath of roses a garland to hang above our 
graves, that you look so sad? O, Edith, this is our golden time! 
Tarnish it not by any pensive shadow of the mind; for it may be 
that nothing of futurity will be brighter than the mere remem- 
brance of what is now passing." 

"That was the very thought that saddened me! How came 
it in your mind too?" said Edith, in a still lower tone than he, 
for it was high treason to be sad at Merry Mount. "Therefore 
do I sigh amid this festive music. And besides, dear Edgar, I 
struggle as with a dream, and fancy that these shapes of our 
jovial friends are visionary, and their mirth unreal, and that 
we are no true Lord and Lady of the May. What is the mys- 
tery in my heart?" 

Just then, as if a spell had loosened them, down came a little 
shower of withering rose leaves from the Maypole. Alas, for 



THE MAYPOLE OF MERRY MOUNT 205 

the young lovers ! No sooner had their hearts glowed with real 
passion than they were sensible of something vague and un- 
substantial in their former pleasures, and felt a dreary presenti- 
ment of inevitable change. From the moment that they truly 
loved, they had subjected themselves to earth's doom of care 
and sorrow, and troubled joy, and had no more a home at 
Merry Mount. That was Edith's mystery. Now leave we the 
priest to marry them, and the masquers to sport round the 
Maypole, till the last sunbeam be withdrawn from its summit, 
and the shadows of the forest mingle gloomily in the dance. 
Meanwhile, we may discover who these gay people were. 

Two hundred years ago, and more, the old world and its 
inhabitants became mutually weary of each other. Men voy- 
aged by thousands to the West: some to barter glass beads, 
and such like jewels, for the furs of the Indian hunter; some to 
conquer virgin empires; and one stern band to pray. But none 
of these motives had much weight with the colonists of Merry 
Mount. Their leaders were men who had sported so long with 
life, that when Thought and Wisdom came, even these unwel- 
come guests were led astray by the crowd of vanities which 
they should have put to flight. Erring Thought and perverted 
Wisdom were made to put on masques, and play the fool. The 
men of whom we speak, after losing the heart's fresh gayety, 
imagined a wild philosophy of pleasure, and came hither to act 
out their latest day-dream. They gathered followers from all 
that giddy tribe whose whole life is like the festal days of 
soberer men. In their train were minstrels, not unknown in 
London streets: wandering players, whose theatres had been 
the halls of noblemen; mummers, rope-dancers, and mounte- 
banks, who would long be missed at wakes, church ales, and 
fairs; in a word, mirth makers of every sort, such as abounded 
in that age, but now began to be discountenanced by the rapid 
growth of Puritanism. Light had their footsteps been on land, 
and as lightly they came across the sea. Many had been mad- 
dened by their previous troubles into a gay despair ; others were 
as madly gay in the flush of youth, like the May Lord and his 
Lady; but whatever might be the quality of their mirth, old 
and young were gay at Merry Mount. The young deemed them- 
selves happy. The elder spirits, if they knew that mirth was 
but the counterfeit of happiness, yet followed the false shadow 



206 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

wilfully, because at least her garments glittered brightest. 
Sworn triflers of a lifetime, they would not venture among the 
sober truths of life not even to be truly blest. 

All the hereditary pastimes of Old England were transplanted 
hither. The King of Christmas was duly crowned, and the 
Lord of Misrule bore potent sway. On the Eve of St. John, 
they felled whole acres of the forest to make bonfires, and 
danced by the blaze all night, crowned with garlands, and 
throwing flowers into the flame. At harvest time, though their 
crop was of the smallest, they made an image with the sheaves 
of Indian corn, and wreathed it with autumnal garlands, and 
bore it home triumphantly. But what chiefly characterized 
the colonists of Merry Mount was their veneration for the 
Maypole. It has made their true history a poet's tale. Spring 
decked the hallowed emblem with young blossoms and fresh 
green boughs; Summer brought roses of the deepest blush, and 
the perfected foliage of the forest; Autumn enriched it with 
that red and yellow gorgeousness which converts each wild- 
wood leaf into a painted flower; and Winter silvered it with 
sleet, and hung it round with icicles, till it flashed in the cold 
sunshine, itself a frozen sunbeam. Thus each alternate season 
did homage to the Maypole, and paid it a tribute of its own 
richest splendor. Its votaries danced round it, once, at least, 
in every month ; sometimes they called it their religion, or their 
altar; but always, it was the banner staff of Merry Mount. 

Unfortunately, there were men in the new world of a sterner 
faith than these Maypole worshippers. Not far from Merry 
Mount was a settlement of Puritans, most dismal wretches, 
who said their prayers Jbef ore daylight, and then wrought in 
the forest or the cornfield till evening made it prayer time again. 
Their weapons were always at hand to shoot down the strag- 
gling savage. When they met in conclave, it was never to keep 
up the old English mirth, but to hear sermons three hours long, 
or to proclaim bounties on the heads of wolves and the scalps 
of Indians. Their festivals were fast days, and their chief 
pastime the singing of psalms. Woe to the youth or maiden 
who did but dream of a dance! The selectman nodded to the 
constable; and there sat the light-heeled reprobate in the 
stocks; or if he danced, it was round the whipping-post, which 
might be termed the Puritan Maypole. 



THE MAYPOLE OF MERRY MOUNT 207 

A party of these grim Puritans, toiling through the difficult 
woods, each with a horseload of iron armor to burden his foot- 
steps, would sometimes draw near the sunny precincts of 
Merry Mount. There were the silken colonists, sporting round 
their Maypole; perhaps teaching a bear to dance, or striving 
to communicate their mirth to the grave Indian; or masquer- 
ading in the skins of deer and wolves, which they had hunted 
for that especial purpose. Often, the whole colony were play- 
ing at blindman's buff, magistrates and all, with their eyes 
bandaged, except a single scapegoat, whom the blinded sinners 
pursued by the tinkling of the bells at his garments. Once, it is 
said, they were seen following a flower-decked corpse, with 
merriment and festive music, to his grave. But did the dead 
man laugh? In their quietest times, they sang ballads and told 
tales, for the edification of their pious visitors; or perplexed 
them with juggling tricks; or grinned at them through horse 
collars; and when sport itself grew wearisome, they made game 
of their own stupidity, and began a yawning match. At the 
very least of these enormities, the men of iron shook their 
heads and frowned so darkly that the revellers looked up, 
imagining that a momentary cloud had overcast the sunshine, 
which was to be perpetual there. On the other hand, the Puri- 
tans affirmed that, when a psalm was pealing from their place 
of worship, the echo which the forest sent them back seemed 
often like the chorus of a jolly catch, closing with a roar of 
laughter. Who but the fiend, and his bond slaves, the crew of 
Merry Mount, had thus disturbed them? In due time, a feud 
arose, stern and bitter on one side, and as serious on the other 
as anything could be among such light spirits as had sworn 
allegiance to the Maypole. The future complexion of New Eng- 
land was involved in this important quarrel. Should the grizzly 
saints establish their jurisdiction over the gay sinners, then 
would their spirits darken all the clime and make it a land of 
clouded visages, of hard toil, of sermon and psalm forever. 
But should the banner staff of Merry Mount be fortunate, 
sunshine would break upon the hills, and flowers would beautify 
the forest, and late posterity do homage to the Maypole. 

After these authentic passages from history, we return to 
the nuptials of the Lord and Lady of the May. Alas! we have 
delayed too long, and must darken our tale too suddenly. As 



208 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

we glance again at the Maypole, a solitary sunbeam is fading 
from the summit, and leaves only a faint, golden tinge blended 
with the hues of the rainbow banner. Even that dim light is 
now withdrawn, relinquishing the whole domain of Merry 
Mount to the evening gloom, which has rushed so instantane- 
ously from the black surrounding woods. But some of these 
black shadows have rushed forth in human shape. 

Yes, with the setting sun, the last day of mirth had passed 
from Merry Mount. The ring of gay masquers was disordered 
and broken; the stag lowered his antlers in dismay; the wolf 
grew weaker than a lamb ; the bells of the morris-dancers tinkled 
with tremulous affright. The Puritans had played a character- 
istic part in the Maypole mummeries. Their darksome figures 
were intermixed with the wild shapes of their foes, and made 
the scene a picture of the moment, when waking thoughts start 
up amid the scattered fantasies of a dream. The leader of the 
hostile party stood in the centre of the circle, while the route 
of monsters cowered around him, like evil spirits in the pres- 
ence of a dread magician. No fantastic foolery could look him 
in the face. So stern was the energy of his aspect, that the 
whole man, visage, frame, and soul, seemed wrought of iron, 
gifted with life and thought, yet all of one substance with his 
headpiece and breastplate. It was the Puritan of Puritans; 
it was Endicott himself ! 1 

"Stand off, priest of Baal!" said he, with a grim frown, and 
laying no reverent hand upon the surplice. "I know thee, 
Blackstone! 2 Thou art the man who couldst not abide the rule 
even of thine own corrupted church, and hast come hither to 
preach iniquity, and to give example of it in thy life. But now 
shall it be seen that the Lord hath sanctified this wilderness for 
his peculiar people. Woe unto them that would defile it ! And 
first, for this flower-decked abomination, the altar of thy wor- 
ship!" 

And with his keen sword Endicott assaulted the hallowed 
Maypole. Nor long did it resist his arm. It groaned with a 
dismal sound; it showered leaves and rosebuds upon the re- 

1 John Endicott (i 589-1665), Governor of Massachusetts. 

2 Did Governor Endicott speak less positively, we should suspect a mistake 
here. The Rev. Mr. Blackstone, though an eccentric, is not known to have been 
an immoral man. We rather doubt his identity with the priest of Merry Mount. 
[Author'^ note.] 



THE MAYPOLE OF MERRY MOUNT 209 

morseless enthusiast; and finally, with all its green boughs and 
ribbons and flowers, symbolic of departed pleasures, down fell 
the banner staff of Merry Mount. As it sank, tradition says, 
the evening sky grew darker, and the woods threw forth a more 
sombre shadow. 

"There," cried Endicott, looking triumphantly on his work, 
"there lies the only Maypole in New England! The thought is 
strong within me that, by its fall, is shadowed forth the fate of 
light and idle mirth makers, amongst us and our posterity. 
Amen, saith John Endicott." 

"Amen!" echoed his followers. 

But the votaries of the Maypole gave one groan for their 
idol. At the sound, the Puritan leader glanced at the crew of 
Comus, each a figure of broad mirth, yet, at this moment, 
strangely expressive of sorrow and dismay. 

"Valiant captain," quoth Peter Palfrey, the Ancient of the 
band, "what order shall be taken with the prisoners?" 

"I thought not to repent me of cutting down a Maypole," 
replied Endicott, "yet now I could find in my heart to plant it 
again, and give each of these bestial pagans one other dance 
round their idol. It would have served rarely for a whipping- 
post!" 

"But there are pine-trees enow," suggested the lieutenant. 

"True, good Ancient," said the leader. "Wherefore, bind 
the heathen crew, and bestow on them a small matter of stripes 
apiece, as earnest of our future justice. Set some of the rogues 
in the stocks to rest themselves, so soon as Providence shall 
bring us to one of our own well-ordered settlements, where such 
accommodations may be found. Further penalties, such as 
branding and cropping of ears, shall be thought of here- 
after." 

"How many stripes for the priest?" inquired Ancient 
Palfrey. 

"None as yet," answered Endicott, bending his iron frown 
upon the culprit. "It must be for the Great and General Court 
to determine, whether stripes and long imprisonment, and 
other grievous penalty, may atone for his transgressions. Let 
him look to himself! For such as violate our civil order, it may 
be permitted us to show mercy. But woe to the wretch that 
troubleth our religion!" 



210 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

"And this dancing bear," resumed the officer. "Must he 
share the stripes of his fellows?" 

"Shoot him through the head!" said the energetic Puritan. 
"I suspect witchcraft in the beast." 

"Here be a couple of shining ones," continued Peter Palfrey, 
pointing his weapon at the Lord and Lady of the May. "They 
seem to be of high station among these misdoers. Methinks 
their dignity will not be fitted with less than a double share of 
stripes." 

Endicott rested on his sword, and closely surveyed the dress 
and aspect of the hapless pair. There they stood, pale, down- 
cast, and apprehensive. Yet there was an air of mutual support, 
and of pure affection, seeking aid and giving it, that showed 
them to be man and wife, with the sanction of priest upon their 
love. The youth, in the peril of the moment, had dropped his 
gilded staff, and thrown his arm about the Lady of the May, 
who leaned against his breast, too lightly to burden him, but 
with weight enough to express that their destinies were linked 
together, for good or evil. They looked first at each other, and 
then into the grim captain's face. There they stood, in the 
first hour of wedlock, while the idle pleasures, of which their 
companions were the emblems, had given place to the sternest 
cares of life, personified by the dark Puritans. But never had 
their youthful beauty seemed so pure and high as when its 
glow was chastened by adversity. 

"Youth," said Endicott, "ye stand in an evil case, thou and 
thy maiden wife. Make ready presently, for I am minded that 
ye shall both have a token to remember your wedding day!" 

"Stern man," cried the May Lord, "how can I move thee? 
Were the means at hand, I would resist to the death. Being 
powerless, I entreat! Do with me as thou wilt, but let Edith go 
untouched!" 

" Not so," replied the immitigable zealot. " We are not wont 
to show an idle courtesy to that sex, which requireth the 
stricter discipline. What sayest thou, maid? Shall thy silken 
bridegroom suffer thy share of the penalty, besides his own? " 

"Be it death," said Edith, "and lay it all on me!" 

Truly, as Endicott had said, the poor lovers stood in a woful 
case. Their foes were triumphant, their friends captive and 
abased, their home desolate, the benighted wilderness around 



THE MAYPOLE OF MERRY MOUNT 211 

them, and a rigorous destiny, in the shape of the Puritan 
leader, their only guide. Yet the deepening twilight could not 
altogether conceal that the iron man was softened ; he smiled at 
the fair spectacle of early love; he almost sighed for the inevi- 
table blight of early hopes. 

"The troubles of life have come hastily on this young 
couple," observed Endicott. "We will see how they comport 
themselves under their present trials ere we burden them with 
greater. If, among the spoil, there be any garments of a more 
decent fashion, let them be put upon this May Lord and his 
Lady, instead of their glistening vanities. Look to it, some of 
you." 

"And shall not the youth's hair be cut? " asked Peter Palfrey, 
looking with abhorrence at the love-lock and long glossy curls 
of the young man. 

"Crop it forthwith, and that in the true pumpkin-shell 
fashion," answered the captain. "Then bring them along with 
us, but more gently than their fellows. There be qualities in the 
youth, which may make him valiant to fight, and sober to toil, 
and pious to pray; and in the maiden, that may fit her to be- 
come a mother in our Israel, bringing up babes in better nur- 
ture than her own hath been. Nor think ye, young ones, that 
they are the happiest, even in our lifetime of a moment, who 
misspend it in dancing round a Maypole!" 

And Endicott, the severest Puritan of all who laid the rock 
foundation of New England, lifted the wreath of roses from the 
ruin of the Maypole, and threw it, with his own gauntleted 
hand, over the heads of the Lord and Lady of the May. It was a 
deed of prophecy. As the moral gloom of the world overpowers 
all systematic gayety, even so was their home of wild mirth 
made desolate amid the sad forest. They returned to it no more. 
But as their flowery garland was wreathed of the brightest 
roses that had grown there, so, in the tie that united them, 
were intertwined all the purest and best of their early joys. 
They went heavenward, supporting each other along the diffi- 
cult path which it was their lot to tread, and never wasted one 
regretful thought on the vanities of Merry Mount. 



212 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

THE OLD MANSE 1 

THE AUTHOR MAKES THE READER ACQUAINTED WITH 
HIS ABODE 

Between two tall gateposts of rough-hewn stone (the gate 
itself having fallen from its hinges at some unknown epoch) 
we beheld the gray front of the old parsonage terminating the 
vista of an avenue of black ash-trees. It was now a twelve- 
month since the funeral procession of the venerable clergyman, 2 
its last inhabitant, had turned from that gateway towards the 
village burying-ground. The wheel-track leading to the door, 
as well as the whole breadth of the avenue, was almost over- 
grown with grass, affording dainty mouthfuls to two or three 
vagrant cows and an old white horse who had his own living 
to pick up along the roadside. The glimmering shadows that 
lay half asleep between the door of the house and the public 
highway were a kind of spiritual medium, seen through which 
the edifice had not quite the aspect of belonging to the material 
world. Certainly it had little in common with those ordinary 
abodes which stand so imminent upon the road that every 
passer-by can thrust his head, as it were, into the domestic 
circle. From these quiet windows the figures of passing travel- 
lers looked too remote and dim to disturb the sense of privacy. 
In its near retirement and accessible seclusion it was the very 
spot for the residence of a clergyman, — a man not estranged 
from human life, yet enveloped in the midst of it with a veil 
woven of intermingled gloom and brightness. It was worthy 
to have been one of the time-honored parsonages of England 
in which, through many generations, a succession of holy oc- 
cupants pass from youth to age, and bequeath each an inherit- 
ance of sanctity to pervade the house and hover over it as with 
an atmosphere. 

Nor, in truth, had the Old Manse ever been profaned by a 
lay occupant until that memorable summer afternoon when I 

1 Mosses from an Old Manse. After leaving Brook Farm and marrying Sophia 
Peabody, Hawthorne came, in 1842, to live in the parsonage adjacent to the 
battle-ground at Concord. Here he prepared for publication a collection of 
essays and stories, writing "The Old Manse" as an introduction. The work 
appeared, in two volumes, in 1846, with a title suggested by the house itself. 

2 Dr. Ezra Ripley. See Emerson's Lectures and Biographical Sketches. 



THE OLD MANSE 213 

.ntered it as my home. A priest had built it; a priest had suc- 
ceeded to it; other priestly men from time to time had dwelt in 
it; and children born in its chambers had grown up to assume 
the priestly character. It was awful to reflect how many ser- 
mons must have been written there. The latest inhabitant 
alone — he by whose translation to paradise the dwelling was 
left vacant — had penned nearly three thousand discourses, 
besides the better, if not the greater, number that gushed liv- 
ing from his lips. How often, no doubt, had he paced to and 
fro along the avenue, attuning his meditations to the sighs and 
gentle murmurs, and deep and solemn peals of the wind among 
the lofty tops of the trees ! In that variety of natural utterances 
he could find something accordant with every passage of his 
sermon, were it of tenderness or reverential fear. The boughs 
over my head seemed shadowy with solemn thoughts as well as 
with rustling leaves. I took shame to myself for having been 
so long a writer of idle stories, and ventured to hope that 
wisdom would descend upon me with the falling leaves of the 
avenue, and that I should light upon an intellectual treasure 
in the Old Manse well worth those hoards of long-hidden gold 
which people seek for in moss-grown houses. Profound treatises 
of morality; a layman's unprofessional and therefore unprej- 
udiced views of religion; histories (such as Bancroft might have 
written had he taken up his abode here as he once purposed) 
bright with picture, gleaming over a depth of philosophic 
thought, — these were the works that might fitly have flowed 
from such a retirement. In the humblest event I resolved at 
least to achieve a novel that should evolve some deep lesson 
and should possess physical substance enough to stand alone. 
In furtherance of my design, and as if to leave me no pretext 
for not fulfilling it, there was in the rear of the house the most 
delightful little nook of a study that ever afforded its snug 
seclusion to a scholar. It was here that Emerson wrote Nature; 
for he was then an inhabitant of the Manse, and used to watch 
the Assyrian dawn and Paphian sunset and moonrise 1 from 
the summit of our eastern hill. When I first saw the room its 
walls were blackened with the smoke of unnumbered years, 

1 Nature, Chapter in. "Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp 
of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sunset and moonrise my 
Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie . . ." 



2i4 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

and made still blacker by the grim prints of Puritan ministers 
that hung around. These worthies looked strangely like bad an- 
gels, or at least like men who had wrestled so continually and 
so sternly with the devil that somewhat of his sooty fierceness 
had been imparted to their own visages. They had all vanished 
now; a cheerful coat of paint and golden- tinted paper-hangings 
lighted up the small apartment; while the shadow of a willow- 
tree that swept against the overhanging eaves attempered the 
cheery western sunshine. In place of the grim prints there was 
the sweet and lovely head of one of Raphael's Madonnas and 
two pleasant little pictures of the Lake of Como. The only 
other decorations were a purple vase of flowers, always fresh, 
and a bronze one containing graceful ferns. My books (few, 
and by no means choice; for they were chiefly such waifs as 
chance had thrown in my way) stood in order about the room, 
seldom to be disturbed. 

The study had three windows, set with little, old-fashioned 
panes of glass, each with a crack across it. The two on the 
western side looked, or rather peeped, between the willow 
branches down into the orchard, with glimpses of the river 
through the trees. The third, facing northward, commanded 
a broader view of the river at a spot where its hitherto obscure 
waters gleam forth into the light of history. It was at this 
window that the clergyman who then dwelt in the Manse stood 
watching the outbreak of a long and deadly struggle between 
two nations ; he saw the irregular array of his parishioners on 
the farther side of the river and the glittering line of the British 
on the hither bank. He awaited in an agony of suspense the 
rattle of the musketry. It came, and there needed but a gen- 
tle wind to sweep the battle smoke around this quiet house. 

Perhaps the reader, whom I cannot help considering as my 
guest in the Old Manse and entitled to all courtesy in the way 
of sight-showing, — perhaps he will choose to take a nearer 
view of the memorable spot. We stand now on the river's 
brink. It may well be called the Concord, the river of peace 
and quietness; for it is certainly the most unexcitable and 
sluggish stream that ever loitered imperceptibly towards its 
eternity — the sea. Positively, I had lived three weeks beside 
it before it grew quite clear to my perception which way the 
current flowed. It never has a vivacious aspect except when a 



THE OLD MANSE 215 

northwestern breeze is vexing its surface on a sunshiny day. 
From the incurable indolence of its nature, the stream is 
happily incapable of becoming the slave of human ingenuity, 
as is the fate of so many a wild, free mountain torrent. While 
all things else are compelled to subserve some useful purpose, 
it idles its sluggish life away in lazy liberty, without turning a 
solitary spindle or affording even water-power enough to grind 
the corn that grows upon its banks. The torpor of its movement 
allows it nowhere a bright, pebbly shore, nor so much as a nar- 
row strip of glistening sand, in any part of its course. It slum- 
bers between broad prairies, kissing the long meadow grass, 
and bathes the overhanging boughs of elder bushes and wil- 
lows or the roots of elms and ash-trees and clumps of maples. 
Flags and rushes grow along its plashy shore; the yellow 
water-lily spreads its broad, flat leaves on the margin; and the 
fragrant white pond-lily abounds, generally selecting a posi- 
tion just so far from the river's brink that it cannot be grasped 
save at the hazard of plunging in. 

It is a marvel whence this perfect flower derives its loveliness 
and perfume, springing as it does from the black mud over 
which the river sleeps, and where lurk the slimy eel and 
speckled frog and the mud turtle, whom continual washing 
cannot cleanse. It is the very same black mud out of which 
the yellow lily sucks its obscene life and noisome odor. Thus 
we see, too, in the world that some persons assimilate only 
what is ugly and evil from the same moral circumstances which 
supply good and beautiful results — the fragrance of celestial 
flowers — to the daily life of others. 

The reader must not, from any testimony of mine, contract 
a dislike towards our slumberous stream. In the light of a calm 
and golden sunset it becomes lovely beyond expression; the 
more lovely for the quietude that so well accords with the hour, 
when even the wind, after blustering all day long, usually 
hushes itself to rest. Each tree and rock, and every blade of 
grass, is distinctly imaged, and, however unsightly in reality, 
assumes ideal beauty in the reflection. The minutest things of 
earth and the broad aspect of the firmament are pictured 
equally without effort and with the same felicity of success. 
All the sky glows downward at our feet; the rich clouds float 
through the unruffled bosom of the stream like heavenly 



2i6 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

thoughts through a peaceful heart. We will not, then, malign 
our river as gross and impure while it can glorify itself with so 
adequate a picture of the heaven that broods above it; or, if 
we remember its tawny hue and the muddiness of its bed, let 
it be a symbol that the earthliest human soul has an infinite 
spiritual capacity and may contain the better world within its 
depths. But, indeed, the same lesson might be drawn out of 
any mud puddle in the streets of a city; and, being taught us 
everywhere, it must be true. 

' Come, we have pursued a somewhat devious track in our 
walk to the battle-ground. Here we are, at the point where the 
river was crossed by the old bridge, the possession of which 
was the immediate object of the contest. On the hither side 
grow two or three elms, throwing a wide circumference of 
shade, but which must have been planted at some period 
within the threescore years and ten that have passed since 
the battle day. On the farther shore, overhung by a clump 
of elder bushes, we discern the stone abutment of the bridge. 
Looking down into the river, I once discovered some heavy 
fragments of the timbers, all green with half a century's growth 
of water moss; for during that length of time the tramp of 
horses and human footsteps has ceased alpng this ancient 
highway. The stream has here about the breadth of twenty 
strokes of a swimmer's arm, — a space not too wide when the 
bullets were whistling across. Old people who dwell hereabouts 
will point out the very spots on the western bank where our 
countrymen fell down and died; and on this side of the river an 
obelisk of granite has grown up from the soil that was fertilized 
with British blood. The monument, not more than twenty 
feet in height, is such as it befitted the inhabitants of a village 
to erect in illustration of a matter of local interest rather than 
what was suitable to commemorate an epoch of national his- 
tory. Still, by the fathers of the village this famous deed was 
done; and their descendants might rightfully claim the privi- 
lege of building a memorial. 

A humbler token of the fight, yet a more interesting one than 
the granite obelisk, may be seen close under the stone-wall 
which separates the battle-ground from the precincts of the 
parsonage. It is the grave — marked by a small, mossgrown 
fragment of stone at the head and another at the foot — the 



THE OLD MANSE 217 

grave of two British soldiers who were slain in the skirmish, 
and have ever since slept peacefully where Zechariah Brown 
and Thomas Davis buried them. Soon was their warfare ended ; 
a weary night march from Boston, a rattling volley of musketry 
across the river, and then these many years of rest. In the long 
procession of slain invaders who passed into eternity from the 
battle-fields of the revolution, these two nameless soldiers led 
the way. 

Lowell, the poet, as we were once standing over this grave, 
told me a tradition in reference to one of the inhabitants below. 
The story has something deeply impressive, though its circum- 
stances cannot altogether be reconciled with probability. A 
youth in the service of the clergyman happened to be chopping 
wood, that April morning, at the back door of the Manse, and 
when the noise of battle rang from side to side of the bridge he 
hastened across the intervening field to see what might be 
going forward. It is rather strange, by the way, that this lad 
should have been so diligently at work when the whole popu- 
lation of town and country were startled out of their customary 
business by the advance of the British troops. Be that as it 
might, the tradition says that the lad now left his task and 
hurried to the battle-field with the axe still in his hand. The 
British had by this time retreated, the Americans were in pur- 
suit; and the late scene of strife was thus deserted by both 
parties. Two soldiers lay on the ground — one was a corpse; 
but, as the young New Englander drew nigh, the other Briton 
raised himself painfully upon his hands and knees and gave 
a ghastly stare into his face. The boy, — it must have been a 
nervous impulse, without purpose, without thought, and be- 
tokening a sensitive and impressible nature rather than a 
hardened one, ■ — the boy uplifted his axe and dealt the 
wounded soldier a fierce and fatal blow upon the head. 

I could wish that the grave might be opened; for I would 
fain know whether either of the skeleton soldiers has the mark 
of an axe in his skull. The story comes home to me like truth. 
Oftentimes, as an intellectual and moral exercise, I have sought 
to follow that poor youth through his subsequent career, and 
observe how his soul was tortured by the blood stain, con- 
tracted as it had been before the long custom of war had robbed 
human life of its sanctity, and while it still seemed murderous 



218 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

to slay a brother man. This one circumstance has borne more 
fruit for me than all that history tells us of the fight. 

Many strangers come in the summer time to view the battle- 
ground. For my own part, I have never found my imagination 
much excited by this or any other scene of historic celebrity; 
nor would the placid margin of the river have lost any of its 
charm for me had men never fought and died there. There is a 
wilder interest in the tract of land — perhaps a hundred yards 
in breadth — which extends between the battle-field and the 
northern face of our Old Manse, with its contiguous avenue 
and orchard. Here, in some unknown age, before the white 
man came, stood an Indian village, convenient to the river, 
whence its inhabitants must have drawn so large a part of their 
subsistence. The site is identified by the spear and arrow heads, 
the chisels, and other implements of war, labor, and the chase, 
which the plough turns up from the soil. You see a splinter of 
stone, half hidden beneath a sod ; it looks like nothing worthy of 
note; but, if you have faith enough to pick it up, behold a relic! 
Thoreau, who has a strange faculty of finding what the Indians 
have left behind them, first set me on the search; and I after- 
wards enriched myself with some very perfect specimens, so 
rudely wrought that it seemed almost as if chance had fash- 
ioned them. Their great charm consists in this rudeness and in 
the individuality of each article, so different from the produc- 
tions of civilized machinery, which shapes everything on one 
pattern. There is exquisite delight, too, in picking up for one's 
self an arrowhead that was dropped centuries ago and has 
never been handled since, and which we thus receive directly 
from the hand of the red hunter, who purposed to shoot it at 
his game or at an enemy. Such an incident builds up again the 
Indian village and its encircling forest, and recalls to life the 
painted chiefs and warriors, the squaws at their household toil, 
and the children sporting among the wigwams, while the little 
wind-rocked pappoose swings from the branch of the tree. It 
can hardly be told whether it is a joy or a pain, after such a 
momentary vision, to gaze around in the broad daylight of 
reality and see stone fences, white houses, potato fields, and 
men doggedly hoeing in their shirt-sleeves and homespun 
pantaloons. But this is nonsense. The Old Manse is better 
than a thousand wigwams. 



THE OLD MANSE 219 

The Old Manse! We had almost forgotten it, but will return 
thither through the orchard. This was set out by the last 
clergyman, in the decline of his life, when the neighbors 
laughed at the hoary-headed man for planting trees from which 
he could have no prospect of gathering fruit. Even had that 
been the case, there was only so much the better motive for 
planting them, in the pure and unselfish hope of benefiting his 
successors, — an end so seldom achieved by more ambitious 
efforts. But the old minister, before reaching his patriarchal 
age of ninety, ate the apples from this orchard during many 
years, and added silver and gold to his annual stipend by dis- 
posing of the superfluity. It is pleasant to think of him walking 
among the trees in the quiet afternoons of early autumn and 
picking up here and there a windfall, while he observes how 
heavily the branches are weighed down, and computes the 
number of empty flour barrels that will be filled by their bur- 
den. He loved each tree, doubtless, as if it had been his own 
child. An orchard has a relation to mankind, and readily con- 
nects itself with matters of the heart. The trees possess a 
domestic character; they have lost the wild nature of their for- 
est kindred, and have grown humanized by receiving the care 
of man as well as by contributing to his wants. There is so 
much individuality of character, too, among apple-trees that 
it gives them an additional claim to be the objects of human 
interest. One is harsh and crabbed in its manifestations; an- 
other gives us fruit as mild as charity. One is churlish and 
illiberal, evidently grudging the few apples that it bears; an- 
other exhausts itself in free-hearted benevolence. The variety 
of grotesque shapes into which apple-trees contort themselves 
has its effect on those who get acquainted with them: they 
stretch out their crooked branches, and take such hold of the 
imagination that we remember them as humorists and odd- 
fellows. And what is more melancholy than the old apple-trees 
that linger about the spot where once stood a homestead, but 
where there is now only a ruined chimney rising out of a grassy 
and weed-grown cellar? They offer their fruit to every way- 
farer, — apples that are bitter sweet with the moral of Time's 
vicissitude. 

I have met with no other such pleasant trouble in the world 
as that of finding myself, with only the two or three mouths 



220 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

which it was my privilege to feed, the sole inheritor of the old 
clergyman's wealth of fruits. Throughout the summer there 
were cherries and currants; and then came autumn, with his 
immense burden of apples, dropping them continually from his 
overladen shoulders as he trudged along. In the stillest after- 
noon, if I listened, the thump of a great apple was audible, 
falling without a breath of wind, from the mere necessity of 
perfect ripeness. And, besides, there were pear-trees, that 
flung down bushels upon bushels of heavy pears; and peach- 
trees, which, in a good year, tormented me with peaches, 
neither to be eaten nor kept, nor, without labor and perplexity, 
to be given away. The idea of an infinite generosity and ex- 
haustless bounty on the part of our Mother Nature was well 
worth obtaining through such cares as these. That feeling can 
be enjoyed in perfection only by the natives of summer islands, 
where the bread-fruit, the cocoa, the palm, and the orange 
grow spontaneously and hold forth the ever-ready meal; but 
likewise almost as well by a man long habituated to city life, 
who plunges into such a solitude as that of the Old Manse, 
where he plucks the fruit of trees that he did not plant, and 
which therefore, to my heterodox taste, bear the closest re- 
semblance to those that grew in Eden. It has been an apothegm 
these five thousand years, that toil sweetens the bread it earns. 
For my part (speaking from hard experience, acquired while 
belaboring the rugged furrows of Brook Farm), I relish best 
the free gifts of Providence. 

Not that it can be disputed that the light toil requisite to 
cultivate a moderately-sized garden imparts such zest to 
kitchen vegetables as is never found in those of the market 
gardener. Childless men, if they would know something of the 
bliss of paternity, should plant a seed, — be it squash, bean, 
Indian corn, or perhaps a mere flower or worthless weed, — 
should plant it with their own hands, and nurse it from infancy 
to maturity altogether by their own care. If there be not too 
many of them, each individual plant becomes an object of 
separate interest. My garden, that skirted the avenue of the 
Manse, was of precisely the right extent. An hour or two of 
morning labor was all that it required. But I used to visit and 
revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation 
over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share 



THE OLD MANSE 221 

or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of crea- 
tion. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to 
observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a row of early- 
peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate 
green. Later in the season the humming-birds were attracted 
by the blossoms of a peculiar variety of bean; and they were a 
joy to me, those little spiritual visitants, for deigning to sip 
airy food out of my nectar cups. Multitudes of bees used to 
bury themselves in the yellow blossoms of the summer squashes. 
This, too, was a deep satisfaction; although when they had 
laden themselves with sweets they flew away to some unknown 
hive, which would give back nothing in requital of what my 
garden had contributed. But I was glad thus to fling a bene- 
faction upon the passing breeze with the certainty that some- 
body must profit by it, and that there would be a little more 
honey in the world to allay the sourness and bitterness which 
mankind is always complaining of. Yes, indeed ; my life was the 
sweeter for that honey. 

Speaking of summer squashes, I must say a word of their 
beautiful and varied forms. They presented an endless diver- 
sity of urns and vases, shallow or deep, scalloped or plain, 
moulded in patterns which a sculptor would do well to copy, 
since Art has never invented anything more graceful. A hun- 
dred squashes in the garden were worthy, in my eyes at least, 
of being rendered indestructible in marble. If ever Providence 
(but I know it never will) should assign me a superfluity of 
gold, part of it shall be expended for a service of plate, or most 
delicate porcelain, to be wrought into the shapes of summer 
squashes gathered from vines which I will plant with my own 
hands. As dishes for containing vegetables they would be 
peculiarly appropriate. 

But not merely the squeamish love of the beautiful was 
gratified by my toil in the kitchen garden. There was a 
hearty enjoyment, likewise, in observing the growth of the 
crook-necked winter squashes, from the first little bulb, with 
the withered blossom adhering to it, until they lay strewn upon 
the soil, big, round fellows, hiding their heads beneath the 
leaves, but turning up their great yellow rotundities to the 
noontide sun. Gazing at them, I felt that by my agency some- 
thing worth living for had been done. A new substance was 



222 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

born into the world. They were real and tangible existences, 
which the mind could seize hold of and rejoice in. A cabbage, 
too, — especially the early Dutch cabbage, which swells to a 
monstrous circumference, until its ambitious heart often bursts 
asunder, — is a matter to be proud of when we can claim a 
share with the earth and sky in producing it. But, after all, 
the hugest pleasure is reserved until these vegetable children 
of ours are smoking on the table, and we, like Saturn, make a 
meal of them. 

What with the river, the battle-field, the orchard and the 
garden, the reader begins to despair of finding his way back into 
the Old Manse. But in agreeable weather it is the truest hos- 
pitality to keep him out-of-doors. I never grew quite acquainted 
with my habitation till a long spell of sulky rain had confined 
me beneath its roof. There could not be a more sombre aspect 
of external Nature than as then seen from the windows of my 
study. The great willow-tree had caught and retained among 
its leaves a whole cataract of water, to be shaken down at 
intervals by the frequent gusts of wind. All day long, and for a 
week together, the rain was drip-drip-dripping and splash- 
splash-splashing from the eaves, and bubbling and foaming 
into the tubs beneath the spouts. The old, unpainted shingles 
of the house and out-buildings were black with moisture; and 
the mosses of ancient growth upon the walls looked green and 
fresh, as if they were the newest things and afterthought of 
Time. The usually mirrored surface of the river was blurred 
by an infinity of raindrops; the whole landscape had a com- 
pletely water-soaked appearance, conveying the impression 
that the earth was wet through like a sponge; while the summit 
of a wooded hill, about a mile distant, was enveloped in a dense 
mist, where the demon of the tempest seemed to have his abid- 
ing-place and to be plotting still direr inclemencies. 

Nature has no kindness, no hospitality, during a rain. In the 
fiercest heat of sunny days she retains a secret mercy, and wel- 
comes the wayfarer to shady nooks of the woods whither the 
sun cannot penetrate; but she provides no shelter against her 
storms. It makes us shiver to think of those deep, umbrageous 
recesses, those overshadowing banks, where we found such 
enjoyment during the sultry afternoons. Not a twig of foliage 
there but would dash a little shower into our faces. Looking 



THE OLD MANSE 223 

reproachfully towards the impenetrable sky, — if sky there 
be above that dismal uniformity of cloud, — we are apt to 
murmur against the whole system of the universe, since it 
involves the extinction of so many summer days in so short a 
life by the hissing and spluttering rain. In such spells of 
weather — and it is to be supposed such weather came — Eve's 
bower in paradise must have been but a cheerless and aguish 
kind of shelter, nowise comparable to the old parsonage, which 
had resources of its own to beguile the week's imprisonment. 
The idea of sleeping on a couch of wet roses ! 

Happy the man who in a rainy day can betake himself to a 
huge garret, stored, like that of the Manse, with lumber that 
each generation has left behind it from a period before the 
revolution. Our garret was an arched hall, dimly illuminated 
through small and dusty windows ; it was but a twilight at the 
best; and there were nooks, or rather caverns, of deep obscurity, 
the secrets of which I never learned, being too reverent of their 
dust and cobwebs. The beams and rafters, roughly hewn and 
with strips of bark still on them, and the rude masonry of the 
chimneys, made the garret look wild and uncivilized, — an 
aspect unlike what was seen elsewhere in the quiet and deco- 
rous old house. But on one side there was a little whitewashed 
apartment which bore the traditionary title of the Saint's 
Chamber, because holy men in their youth had slept and 
studied and prayed there. With its elevated retirement, its 
one window, its small fireplace, and its closet, convenient for 
an oratory, it was the very spot where a young man might 
inspire himself with solemn enthusiasm and cherish saintly 
dreams. The occupants, at various epochs, had left brief 
records and ejaculations inscribed upon the walls. There, too, 
hung a tattered and shrivelled roll of canvas, which on inspec- 
tion proved to be the forcibly wrought picture of a clergyman, in 
wig, band, and gown, holding a Bible in his hand. As I turned 
his face towards the light he eyed me with an air of authority 
such as men of his profession seldom assume in our days. The 
original had been pastor of the parish more than a century 
ago, a friend of Whitefield, and almost his equal in fervid elo- 
quence. I bowed before the efhgy of the dignified divine, and 
felt as if I had now met face to face with the ghost by whom, 
as there was reason to apprehend, the Manse was haunted. 



224 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

Houses of any antiquity in New England are so invariably 
possessed with spirits that the matter seems hardly worth 
alluding to. Our ghost used to heave deep sighs in a particular 
corner of the parlor, and sometimes rustled paper, as if he 
were turning over a sermon in the long upper entry, — where 
nevertheless he was invisible in spite of the bright moonshine 
that fell through the eastern window. Not improbably he 
wished me to edit and publish a selection from a chest full of 
manuscript discourses that stood in the garret. Once, while 
Hillard and other friends sat talking with us in the twilight, 
there came a rustling noise as of a minister's silk gown, sweep- 
ing through the very midst of the company so closely as almost 
to brush against the chairs. Still there was nothing visible. 
A yet stranger business was that of a ghostly servant maid, 
who used to be heard in the kitchen at deepest midnight, 
grinding coffee, cooking, ironing, — performing, in short, all 
kinds of domestic labor, — although no traces of anything 
accomplished could be detected the next morning. Some neg- 
lected duty of her servitude — some ill-starched ministerial 
band — disturbed the poor damsel in her grave and kept her 
at work without any wages. 

But to return from this digression. A part of my predeces- 
sor's library was stored in the garret, — no unfit receptacle 
indeed for such dreary trash as comprised the greater number 
of volumes. x The old books would have been worth nothing at 
an auction. In this venerable garret, however, they possessed 
an interest, quite apart from their literary value, as heirlooms, 
many of which had been transmitted down through a series of 
consecrated hands from the days of the mighty Puritan divines. 
Autographs of famous names were to be seen in faded ink on 
some of their flyleaves; and there were marginal observations 
or interpolated pages closely covered with manuscript in illegi- 
ble shorthand, perhaps concealing matter of profound truth and 
wisdom. The world will never be the better for it. A few of the 
books were Latin folios, written by Catholic authors; others 
demolished Papistry, as with a sledge-hammer, in plain English. 
A dissertation on the book of Job — which only Job himself 
could have had patience to read — filled at least a score of 
small, thickset quartos, at the rate of two or three volumes to 
a chapter. Then there was a vast folio body of divinity — too 



THE OLD MANSE 225 

corpulent a body, it might be feared, to comprehend the 
spiritual element of religion. Volumes of this form dated back 
two hundred years or more, and were generally bound in black 
leather, exhibiting precisely such an appearance as we should 
attribute to books of enchantment. Others equally antique 
were of a size proper to be carried in the large waistcoat pockets 
of old times, — diminutive, but as black as their bulkier 
brethren, and abundantly interfused with Greek and Latin 
quotations. These little old volumes impressed me as if they 
had been intended for very large ones, but had been unfor- 
tunately blighted at an early stage of their growth. 

The rain pattered upon the roof and the sky gloomed 
through the dusty garret windows, while I burrowed among 
these venerable books in search of any living thought which 
should burn like a coal of fire, or glow like an inextinguishable 
gem, beneath the dead trumpery that had long hidden it. But 
I found no such treasure; all was dead alike; and I could not 
but muse deeply and wonderingly upon the humiliating fact 
that the works of man's intellect decay like those of his hands. 
Thought grows mouldy. What was good and nourishing food 
for the spirits of one generation affords no sustenance for the 
next. Books of religion, however, cannot be considered a fair 
test of the enduring and vivacious properties of human thought, 
because such books so seldom really touch upon their ostensible 
subject, and have, therefore, so little business to be written at 
all. So long as an unlettered soul can attain to saving grace, 
there would seem to be no deadly error in holding theological 
libraries to be accumulations of, for the most part, stupendous 
impertinence. 

Many of the books had accrued in the latter years of the last 
clergyman's lifetime. These threatened to be of even less inter- 
est than the elder works, a century hence, to any curious in- 
quirer who should then rummage them as I was doing now. 
Volumes of the Liberal Preacher and Christian Examiner, oc- 
casional sermons, controversial pamphlets, tracts, and other 
productions of a like fugitive nature took the place of the thick 
and heavy volumes of past time. In a physical point of view 
there was much the same difference as between a feather and a 
lump of lead; but, intellectually regarded, the specific gravity 
of old and new was about upon a par. Both also were alike 



226 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

frigid. The elder books, nevertheless, seemed to have been 
earnestly written, and might be conceived to have possessed 
warmth at some former period; although, with the lapse of 
time, the heated masses had cooled down even to the freezing 
point. The frigidity of the modern productions, on the other 
hand, was characteristic and inherent, and evidently had little 
to do with the writer's qualities of mind and heart. In fine, of 
this whole dusty heap of literature I tossed aside all the sacred 
part, and felt myself none the less a Christian for eschewing it. 
There appeared no hope of either mounting to the better world 
on a Gothic staircase of ancient folios or of flying thither on 
the wings of a modern tract. 

Nothing, strange to say, retained any sap except what had 
been written for the passing day and year without the remotest 
pretension or idea of permanence. There were a few old news- 
papers, and still older almanacs, which reproduced to my men- 
tal eye the epochs when they had issued from the press with 
a distinctness that was altogether unaccountable. It was as if 
I had found bits of magic looking-glass among the books, with 
the images of a vanished century in them. I turned my eyes 
towards the tattered picture above mentioned, and asked of 
the austere divine wherefore it was that he and his brethren, 
after the most painful rummaging and groping into their 
minds, had been able to produce nothing half so real as these 
newspaper scribblers and almanac makers had thrown off in 
the effervescence of a moment. The portrait responded not; 
so I sought an answer for myself. It is the age itself that * 
writes newspapers and almanacs, which, therefore, have a 
distinct purpose and meaning at the time, and a kind of intel- 
ligible truth for all times; whereas most other works — being 
written by men who, in the very act, set themselves apart from 
their age — are likely to possess little significance when new, 
and none at all when old. Genius, indeed, melts many ages 
into one, and thus effects something permanent, yet still with 
a similarity of office to that of the more ephemeral writer. A 
work of genius is but the newspaper of a century, or perchance 
of a hundred centuries. 

Lightly as I have spoken of these old books, there yet lingers 
with me a superstitious reverence for literature of all kinds. 
A bound volume has a charm in my eyes similar to what scraps 



THE OLD MANSE 227 

of manuscript possess for the good Mussulman. He imagines 
that those wind-wafted records are perhaps hallowed by some 
sacred verse; and I, that every new book or antique one may 
contain the "open sesame," — the spell to disclose treasures 
hidden in some unsuspected cave of Truth. Thus it was not 
without sadness that I turned away from the library of the Old 
Manse. 

Blessed was the sunshine when it came again at the close of 
another stormy day, beaming from the edge of the western 
horizon; while the massive firmament of clouds threw down 
all the gloom it could, but served only to kindle the golden 
light into a more brilliant glow by the strongly contrasted 
shadows. Heaven smiled at the earth, so long unseen, from 
beneath its heavy eyelid. To-morrow for the hill-tops and the 
wood paths. 

Or it might be that Ellery Channing 1 came up the avenue 
to join me in a fishing excursion on the river. Strange and 
happy times were those when we cast aside all irksome forms 
and strait-laced habitudes, and delivered ourselves up to the 
free air, to live like the Indians or any less conventional race 
during one bright semicircle of the sun. Rowing our boat 
against the current, between wide meadows, we turned aside 
into the Assabeth. A more lovely stream than this, for a mile 
above its junction with the Concord, has never flowed on earth, 
— nowhere, indeed, except to lave the interior regions of a 
poet's imagination. It is sheltered from the breeze by woods 
and a hill-side; so that elsewhere there might be a hurricane, 
and here scarcely a ripple across the shaded water. The cur- 
rent lingers along so gently that the mere force of the boat- 
man's will seems sufficient to propel his craft against it. It 
comes flowing softly through the midmost privacy and deep- 
est heart of a wood which whispers it to be quiet; while the 
stream whispers back again from its sedgy borders, as if river 
and wood were hushing one another to sleep. Yes; the river 
sleeps along its course and dreams of the sky and of the cluster- 
ing foliage, amid which fall showers of broken sunlight, im- 
parting specks of vivid cheerfulness, in contrast with the quiet 
depth of the prevailing tint. Of all this scene, the slumbering 

1 William Ellery Channing (1818-1901), a Concord poet, nephew of the re- 
nowned Unitarian minister of the same name. 



228 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

river has a dream picture in its bosom. Which, after all, was 
the most real — the picture, or the original? — the objects 
palpable to our grosser senses, or their apotheosis in the stream 
beneath? Surely the disembodied images stand in closer rela- 
tion to the soul. But both the original and the reflection had 
here an ideal charm; and, had it been a thought more wild, I 
could have fancied that this river had strayed forth out of the 
rich scenery of my companion's inner world; only the vegeta- 
tion along its banks should then have had an Oriental char- 
acter. 

Gentle and unobtrusive as the river is, yet the tranquil woods 
seem hardly satisfied to allow it passage. The trees are rooted 
on the very verge of the water, and dip their pendent branches 
into it. At one spot there is a lofty bank, on the slope of which 
grow some hemlocks, declining across the stream with out- 
stretched arms, as if resolute to take the plunge. In other 
places the banks are almost on a level with the water; so that 
the quiet congregation of trees set their feet in the flood, and 
are fringed with foliage down to the surface. Cardinal flowers 
kindle their spiral flames and illuminate the dark nooks among 
the shrubbery. The pond-lily grows abundantly along the 
margin — that delicious flower, which, as Thoreau tells me, 
opens its virgin bosom to the first sunlight and perfects its being 
through the magic of that genial kiss. He has beheld beds of 
them unfolding in due succession as the sunrise stole gradually 
from flower to flower — a sight not to be hoped for unless 
when a poet adjusts his inward eye to a proper focus with the 
outward organ. Grape-vines here and there twine themselves 
around shrub and tree and hang their clusters over the water 
within reach of the boatman's hand. Oftentimes they unite 
two trees of alien race in an inextricable twine, marrying the 
hemlock and the maple against their will, and enriching them 
with a purple offspring of which neither is the parent. One of 
these ambitious parasites has climbed into the upper branches 
of a tall white pine, and is still ascending from bough to bough, 
unsatisfied till it shall crown the tree's airy summit with a 
wreath of its broad foliage and a cluster of its grapes. 

The winding course of the stream continually shut out the 
scene behind us, and revealed as calm and lovely a one before. 
We glided from depth to depth, and breathed new seclusion at 



THE OLD MANSE 229 

every turn. The shy kingfisher flew from the withered branch 
close at hand to another at a distance, uttering a shrill cry of 
anger or alarm. Ducks that had been floating there since the 
preceding eve were startled at our approach, and skimmed 
along the glassy river, breaking its dark surface with a bright 
streak. The pickerel leaped from among the lily-pads. The 
turtle, sunning itself upon a rock or at the root of a' tree, slid 
suddenly into the water with a plunge. The painted Indian who 
paddled his canoe along the Assabeth three hundred years ago 
could hardly have seen a wilder gentleness displayed upon its 
banks and reflected in its bosom than we did. Nor could the 
same Indian have prepared his noontide meal with more 
simplicity. We drew up our skiff at some point where the over- 
arching shade formed a natural bower, and there kindled a 
fire with the pine cones and decayed branches that lay strewn 
plentifully around. Soon the smoke ascended among the trees, 
impregnated with a savory incense, not heavy, dull, and sur- 
feiting, like the steam of cookery within doors, but sprightly 
and piquant. The smell of our feast was akin to the woodland 
odors with which it mingled : there was no sacrilege committed 
by our intrusion there: the sacred solitude was hospitable, and 
granted us free leave to cook and eat in the recess that was at 
once our kitchen and banqueting hall. It is strange what humble 
offices may be performed in a beautiful scene without destroy- 
ing its poetry. Our fire, red gleaming among the trees, and we 
beside it, busied with culinary rites and spreading out our meal 
on a mossgrown log, all seemed in unison with the river gliding 
by and the foliage rustling over us. And, what was strangest, 
neither did our mirth seem to disturb the propriety of the sol- 
emn woods; although the hobgoblins of the old wilderness and 
the will-of-the-wisps that glimmered in the marshy places 
might have come trooping to share our table talk, and have 
added their shrill laughter to our merriment. It was the very 
spot in which to utter the extremest nonsense or the profound- 
est wisdom, or that ethereal product of the mind which partakes 
of both, and may become one or the other, in correspondence 
with the faith and insight of the auditor. 

So amid sunshine and shadow, rustling leaves and sighing 
waters, up gushed our talk like the babble of a fountain. The 
evanescent spray was Ellery's; and his, too, the lumps of golden 



230 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

thought that lay glimmering in the fountain's bed and bright- 
ened both our faces by the reflection. Could he have drawn out 
that virgin gold and stamped it with the mint mark that alone 
gives currency, the world might have had the profit, and he the 
fame. My mind was the richer merely by the knowledge that 
it was there. But the chief profit of those wild days to him and 
me lay, not in any definite idea, not in any angular or rounded 
truth, which we dug out of the shapeless mass of problematical 
stuff, but in the freedom which we thereby won from all cus- 
tom and conventionalism and fettering influences of man on 
man. We were so free to-day that it was impossible to be 
slaves again to-morrow. When we crossed the threshold of the 
house or trod the thronged pavements of a city, still the leaves 
of the trees that overhang the Assabeth were whispering to us, 
"Be free! be free!" Therefore along that shady river-bank 
there are spots, marked with a heap of ashes and half -consumed 
brands, only less sacred in my remembrance than the hearth 
of a household fire. 

And yet how sweet, as we floated homeward adown the 
golden river at sunset, — how sweet was it to return within 
the system of human society, not as to a dungeon and a chain, 
but as to a stately edifice, whence we could go forth at will into 
statelier simplicity! How gently, too, did the sight of the Old 
Manse, best seen from the river, overshadowed with its willow 
and all environed about with the f oliage of its orchard and 
avenue, — how gently did its gray, homely aspect rebuke the 
speculative extravagances of the day! It had grown sacred in 
connection with the artificial life against which we inveighed ; 
it had been a home for many years in spite of all; it was my 
home too; and, with these thoughts, it seemed to me that all 
the artifice and conventionalism of life was but an impalpable 
thinness upon its surface, and that the depth below was none 
the worse for it. Once, as we turned our boat to the bank, 
there was a cloud, in the shape of an immensely gigantic figure 
of a hound, couched above the house, as if keeping guard over 
it. Gazing at this symbol, I prayed that the upper influences 
might long protect the institutions that had grown out of the 
heart of mankind. 

If ever my readers should decide to give up civilized life, 
cities, houses, and whatever moral or material enormities in 



THE OLD MANSE 231 

addition to these the perverted ingenuity of our race has con- 
trived, let it be in the early autumn. Then Nature will love 
him better than at any other season, and will take him to her 
bosom with a more motherly tenderness. I could scarcely 
endure the roof of the old house above me in those first autum- 
nal days. How early in the summer, too, the prophecy of 
autumn comes! Earlier in some years than in others; some- 
times even in the first weeks of July. There is no other feeling 
like what is caused by this faint, doubtful, yet real perception 
— if it be not rather a foreboding — of the year's decay, so ' 
blessedly sweet and sad in the same breath. 

Did I say that there was no feeling like it? Ah, but there is 
a half-acknowledged melancholy like to this when we stand in 
the perfected vigor of our life and feel that Time has now given 
us all his flowers, and that the next work of his never idle fin- 
gers must be to steal them one by one away. 

I have forgotten whether the song of the cricket be not as 
early a token of autumn's approach as any other, — that song 
which may be called an audible stillness; for though very loud 
and heard afar, yet the mind does not take note of it as a sound, 
so completely is its individual existence merged among the 
accompanying characteristics of the season. Alas for the 
pleasant summer time ! In August the grass is still verdant on 
the hills and in the valleys; the "foliage of the trees is as dense as 
ever, and as green ; the flowers gleam forth in richer abundance 
along the margin of the river, and by the stone walls, and deep 
among the woods; the days, too, are as fervid now as they were 
a month ago; and yet in every breath of wind and in every 
beam of sunshine we hear the whispered farewell and behold 
the parting smile of a dear friend. There is a coolness amid all 
the heat, a mildness in the blazing noon. Not a breeze can stir 
but it thrills us with the breath of autumn. A pensive glory is 
seen in the far golden gleams, among the shadows of the trees. 
The flowers — even the brightest of them, and they are the 
most gorgeous of the year — have this gentle sadness wedded 
to their pomp, and typify the character of the delicious time 
each within itself. The brilliant cardinal flower has never 
seemed gay to me. 

Still later in the season Nature's tenderness waxes stronger. 
It is impossible not to be fond of our mother now; for she is so 



232 ^NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

fond of us ! At other periods she does not make this impression 
on me, or only at rare intervals; but in those genial days of 
autumn, when she has perfected her harvests and accomplished 
every needful thing that was given her to do, then she overflows 
with a blessed superfluity of love. She has leisure to caress 
her children now. It is good to be alive at such times. Thank 
Heaven for breath — yes, for mere breath — when it is made 
up of a heavenly breeze like this ! It comes with a real kiss upon 
our cheeks; it would linger fondly around us if it might; but, 
since it must be gone, it embraces us with its whole kindly 
heart and passes onward to embrace likewise the next thing 
that it meets. A blessing is flung abroad and scattered far and 
wide over the earth, to be gathered up by all who choose. I 
recline upon the still unwithered grass and whisper to myself, 
"O perfect day! O beautiful world ! O beneficent God ! " And 
it is the promise of a blessed eternity; for our Creator would 
never have made such lovely days and have given us the deep 
hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we 
were meant to be immortal. This sunshine is the golden pledge 
thereof. It beams through the gates of paradise and shows us 
glimpses far inward. 

By and by, in a little time, the outward world' puts on a 
drear austerity. On some October morning there is a heavy 
hoar-frost on the grass and along the tops of the fences; and at 
sunrise the leaves fall from the trees of our avenue without a 
breath of wind, quietly descending by their own weight. All 
summer long they have murmured like the noise of waters; they 
have roared loudly while the branches were wrestling with the 
thunder gust; they have made music both glad and solemn; 
they have attuned my thoughts by their quiet sound as I paced 
to and fro beneath the arch of intermingling boughs. Now they 
can only rustle under my feet. Henceforth the gray parsonage 
begins to assume a larger importance, and draws to its fireside, 

— for the abomination of the air-tight stove is reserved till 
wintry weather, — draws closer and closer to its fireside the 
vagrant impulses that had gone wandering about through the 
summer. 

When summer was dead and buried the Old Manse became 
as lonely as a hermitage. Not that ever — in my time at least 

— it had been thronged with company; but, at no rare inter- 



THE OLD MANSE 233 

vals, we welcomed some friend out of the dusty glare and 
tumult of the world, and rejoiced to share with him the trans- 
parent obscurity that was floating over us. In one respect our 
precincts were like the Enchanted Ground through which the 
pilgrim travelled on his way to the Celestial City ! x The guests, 
each and all, felt a slumberous influence upon them; they fell 
asleep in chairs, or took a more deliberate siesta on the sofa, or 
were seen stretched among the shadows of the orchard, looking 
up dreamily through the boughs. They could not have paid a 
more acceptable compliment to my abode, nor to my own 
qualities as a host. I held it as a proof that they left their cares 
behind them as they passed between the stone gate-posts at the 
entrance of our avenue, and that the so powerful opiate was the 
abundance of peace and quiet within and all around us. Others 
could give them pleasure and amusement or instruction — 
these could be picked up anywhere; but it was for me to give 
them rest — rest in a life of trouble. What better could be done 
for those weary and world-worn spirits? — for him whose 
career of perpetual action was impeded and harassed by the 
rarest of his powers and the richest of his acquirements? — for 
another who had thrown his ardent heart from earliest youth 
into the strife of politics, and now, perchance, began to suspect 
that one lifetime is too brief for the accomplishment of any 
lofty aim? — for her on whose feminine nature had been im- 
posed the heavy gift of intellectual power, such as a strong man 
might have staggered under, and with it the necessity to act 
upon the world? — in a word, not to multiply instances, what 
better could be done for anybody who came within our magic 
circle than to throw the spell of a tranquil spirit over him? And 
when it had wrought its full effect, then we dismissed him, with 
but misty reminiscences, as if he had been dreaming of us. 

Were I to adopt a pet idea, as so many people do, and fondle 
it in my embraces to the exclusion of all others, it would be, 
that the great want which mankind labors under at this present 
period is sleep. The world should recline its vast head on the 
first convenient pillow and take an age-long nap. It has gone 
distracted through a morbid activity, and, while preternaturally 
wide awake, is nevertheless tormented by visions that seem real 
to it now, but would assume their true aspect and character 
1 The Pilgrim's Progress, near the end. 



234 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

were all things once set right by an interval of sound repose. 
This is the only method of getting rid of old delusions and 
avoiding new ones; of regenerating our race, so that it might in 
due time awake as an infant out of dewy slumber; of restoring 
to us the simple perception of what is right, and the single- 
hearted desire to achieve it, both of which have long been lost 
in consequence of this weary activity of brain and torpor or 
passion of the heart that now afflict the universe. Stimulants, 
the only mode of treatment hitherto attempted, cannot quell 
the disease; they do but heighten the delirium. 

Let not the above paragraph ever be quoted against the 
author; for, though tinctured with its modicum of truth, it is 
the result and expression of what he knew, while he was writing, 
to be but a distorted survey of the state and prospects of man- 
kind. There were circumstances around me which made it 
difficult to view the world precisely as it exists; for, severe and 
sober as was the Old Manse, it was necessary to go but a little 
way beyond its threshold before meeting with stranger moral 
shapes of men than might have been encountered elsewhere in 
a circuit of a thousand miles. 

These hobgoblins of flesh and blood were attracted thither 
by the widespreading influence of a great original thinker, who 
had his earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village. 
His mind acted upon other minds of a certain constitution with 
wonderful magnetism, and drew many men upon long pilgrim- 
ages to speak with him face to face. Young visionaries — to 
whom just so much of insight had been imparted as to make 
life all a labyrinth around them — came to seek the clew that 
should guide them out of their self-involved bewilderment. 
Grayheaded theorists — whose systems, at first air, had finally 
imprisoned them in an iron frame- work — travelled painfully 
to his door, not to ask deliverance, but to invite the free spirit 
into their own thraldom. People that had lighted on a new 
thought, or a thought that they fancied new, came to Emerson, 
as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary, to ascer- 
tain its quality and value. Uncertain, troubled, earnest wan- 
derers through the midnight of the moral world beheld his 
intellectual fire as a beacon burning on a hill-top, and, climbing 
the difficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding obscurity 
more hopefully than hitherto. The light revealed objects un- 



THE OLD MANSE 235 

seen before, — mountains, gleaming lakes, glimpses of a crea- 
tion among the chaos; but, also, as was unavoidable, it attracted 
bats and owls and the whole host of night birds, which flapped 
their dusky wings against the gazer's eyes, and sometimes were 
mistaken for fowls of angelic feather. Such delusions always 
hover nigh whenever a beacon fire of truth is kindled. 

For myself, there had been epochs of my life when I, too, 
might have asked of this prophet the master word that should 
solve me the riddle of the universe; but now, being happy, I 
felt as if there were no question to be put, and therefore admired 
Emerson as a poet of deep beauty and austere tenderness, but 
sought nothing from him as a philosopher. It was good, never- 
theless, to meet him in the woodpaths, or sometimes in our 
avenue, with that pure intellectual gleam diffused about his 
presence like the garment of a shining one ; and he so quiet, so 
simple, so without pretension, encountering each man alive as 
if expecting to receive more than he could impart. And, in 
truth, the heart of many an ordinary man had, perchance, 
inscriptions which he could not read. But it was impossible to 
dwell in his vicinity without inhaling more or less the mountain 
atmosphere of his lofty thought, which, in the brains of some 
people, wrought a singular giddiness, — new truth being as 
heady as new wine. Never was a poor little country village 
infested with such a variety of queer, strangely-dressed, oddly- 
behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves to be 
important agents of the world's destiny, yet were simply bores 
of a very intense water. Such, I imagine, is the invariable char- 
acter of persons who crowd so closely about an original thinker 
as to draw in his unuttered breath and thus become imbued 
with a false originality. This triteness of novelty is enough to 
make any man of common sense blaspheme at all ideas of less 
than a century's standing, and pray that the world may be 
petrified and rendered immovable in precisely the worst moral 
and physical state that it ever yet arrived at, rather than be 
benefited by such schemes of such philosophers. 

And now I begin to feel — and perhaps should have sooner 
felt — that we have talked enough of the Old Manse. Mine 
honored reader, it may be, will vilify the poor author as an 
egotist for babbling through so many pages about a mossgrown 
country parsonage, and his life within its walls and on the river 



236 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

and in the woods, and the influences that wrought upon him 
from all these sources. My conscience, however, does not re- 
proach me with betraying anything too sacredly individual to 
be revealed by a human spirit to its brother or sister spirit. 
How narrow — how shallow and scanty too — is the stream of 
thought that has been flowing from my pen, compared with 
the broad tide of dim emotions, ideas, and associations which 
swell around me from that portion of my existence ! How little 
have I told! and of that little, how almost nothing is even tinc- 
tured with any quality that makes it exclusively my own ! Has 
the reader gone wandering, hand in hand with me, through the 
inner passages of my being? and have we groped together into 
all its chambers and examined their treasures or their rubbish? 
Not so. We have been standing on the greensward, but just 
within the cavern's mouth, where the common sunshine is free 
to penetrate, and where every footstep is therefore free to come. 
I have appealed to no sentiment or sensibilities save such as 
are diffused among us all. So far as I am a man of really indi- 
vidual attributes I veil my face; nor am I, nor have I ever been, 
one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up their 
own hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit for 
their beloved public. 

Glancing back over what I have written, it seems but the 
scattered reminiscences of a single summer. In fairyland there 
is no measurement of time; and, in a spot so sheltered from the 
turmoil of life's ocean, three years hastened away with a noise- 
less flight, as the breezy sunshine chases the cloud shadows 
across the depths of a still valley. Now came hints, growing 
more and more distinct, that the owner of the old house was 
pining for his native air. Carpenters next appeared, making a 
tremendous racket among the outbuildings, strewing the green 
grass with pine shavings and chips of chestnut joists, and vexing 
the whole antiquity of the place with their discordant renova- 
tions. Soon, moreover, they divested our abode of the veil of 
woodbine which had crept over a large portion of its southern 
face. All the aged mosses were cleared unsparingly away; and 
there were horrible whispers about brushing up the external 
walls with a coat of paint — a purpose as little to my taste as 
might be that of rouging; the venerable cheeks of one's grand- 
mother. But the hand that renovates is always more sacrile- 



THE OLD MANSE 237 

gious than that which destroys. In fine, we gathered up our 
household goods, drank a farewell cup of tea in our pleasant 
little breakfast room, — delicately fragrant tea, an unpurchas- 
able luxury, one of the many angel gifts that had fallen like 
dew upon us, — and passed forth between the tall stone gate- 
posts as uncertain as the wandering Arabs where our tent 
might next be pitched. Providence took me by the hand, and 

— an oddity of dispensation which, I trust, there is no irrever- 
ence in smiling at — has led me, as the newspapers announce 
while I am writing, from the Old Manse into a custom house. 
As a story teller, I have often contrived strange vicissitudes for 
my imaginary personages, but none like this. 

The treasure of intellectual good which I hoped to find in 
our secluded dwelling had never come to light. No profound 
treatise of ethics, no philosophic history, no novel even, that 
could stand unsupported on its edges. All that I had to show, 
as a man of letters, were these few tales and essays, which had 
blossomed out like flowers in the calm summer of my heart 
and mind. Save editing (an easy task) the journal of my friend 
of many years, the African Cruiser, 1 1 had done nothing else. 
With these idle weeds and withering blossoms I have inter- 
mixed some that were produced long ago, — old, faded things, 
reminding me of flowers pressed between the leaves of a book, 

— and now offer the bouquet, such as it is, to any whom it 
may please. These fitful sketches, with so little of external life 
about them, yet claiming no profundity of purpose, — so re- 
served, even while they sometimes seem so frank, — often but 
half in earnest, and never, even when most so, expressing satis- 
factorily the thoughts which they profess to image, — such 
trifles, I truly feel, afford no solid basis for a literary reputation. 
Nevertheless, the public — if my limited number of readers, 
whom I venture to regard rather as a circle of friends, may be 
termed a public — will receive them the more kindly, as the 
last offering, the last collection, of this nature which it is my 
purpose ever to put forth. Unless I could do better, I have 
done enough in this kind. For myself the book will always 
retain one charm — as reminding me of the river, with its 
delightful solitudes, and of the avenue, the garden, and the 

1 Journal of an African Cruiser, by Horatio Bridge, an officer of the United 
States Navy. 



238 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

orchard, and especially the dear Old Manse, with the little 
study on its western side, and the sunshine glimmering through 
the willow branches while I wrote. 

Let the reader, if he will do me so much honor, imagine him- 
self my guest, and that, having seen whatever may be worthy 
of notice within and about the Old Manse, he has finally been 
ushered into my study. There, after seating him in an antique 
elbow chair, an heirloom of the house, I take forth a roll of 
manuscript and entreat his attention to the following tales — 
an act of personal inhospitality, however, which I never was 
guilty of, nor ever will be, even to my worst enemy. 

YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN 1 

Young Goodman Brown came forth at sunset into the street 
at Salem village; but put his head back, after crossing the 
threshold, to exchange a parting kiss with his young wife. And 
Faith, as the wife was aptly named, thrust her own pretty head 
into the street, letting the wind play with the pink ribbons of 
her cap while she called to Goodman Brown. 

"Dearest heart," whispered she, softly and rather sadly, 
when her lips were close to his ear, "prithee put off your jour- 
ney until sunrise and sleep in your own bed to-night. A lone 
woman is troubled with such dreams and such thoughts that 
she's afeard of herself sometimes. Pray tarry with me this 
night, dear husband, of all nights in the year." 

"My love and my Faith," replied young Goodman Brown, 
"of all nights in the year, this one night must I tarry away from 
thee. My journey, as thou callest it, forth and back again, 
must needs be done 'twixt now and sunrise. What, my sweet 
wife, dost thou doubt me already, and we but three months 
married?" 

"Then God bless you!" said Faith, with the pink ribbons; 
"and may you find all well when you come back." 

"Amen!" cried Goodman Brown. "Say thy prayers, dear 
Faith, and go to bed at dusk, and no harm will come to 
thee." 

So they parted; and the young man pursued his way until, 
being about to turn the corner by the meeting-house, he looked 
1 Mosses from an Old Manse. 



YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN 239 

back and saw the head of Faith still peeping after him with a 
melancholy air, in spite of her pink ribbons. 

"Poor little Faith!" thought he, for his heart smote him, 
" What a wretch am I to leave her on such an errand ! She talks 
of dreams, too. Methought as she spoke there was trouble in 
her face, as if a dream had warned her what work is to be done 
to-night. But no, no; 't would kill her to think it. Well, she's 
a blessed angel on earth; and after this one night I'll cling to 
her skirts and follow her to heaven." 

With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown 
felt himself justified in making more haste on his present evil 
purpose. He had taken a dreary road, darkened by all the 
gloomiest trees of the forest, which barely stood aside to let the 
narrow path creep through, and closed immediately behind. 
It was all as lonely as could be; and there is this peculiarity in 
such a solitude, that the traveller knows not who may be con- 
cealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs over- 
head; so that with lonely footsteps he may yet be passing 
through an unseen multitude. 

"There may be a devilish Indian behind every tree," said 
Goodman Brown to himself; and he glanced fearfully behind 
him as he added, "What if the devil himself should be at my 
very elbow!" 

His head being turned back, he passed a crook of the road, 
and, looking forward again, beheld the figure of a man, in 
grave and decent attire, seated at the foot of an old tree. He 
arose at Goodman Brown's approach and walked onward side 
by side with him. 

"You are late, Goodman Brown," said he. "The clock of 
the Old South was striking as I came through Boston, and that 
is full fifteen minutes agone." 

"Faith kept me back a while," replied the young man, with 
a tremor in his voice, caused by the sudden appearance of his 
companion, though not wholly unexpected. 

It was now deep dusk in the forest, and deepest in that part 
of it where these two were journeying. As nearly as could be 
discerned, the second traveller was about fifty years old, appar- 
ently in the same rank of life as Goodman Brown, and bearing 
a considerable resemblance to him, though perhaps more in 
expression than features. Still they might have been taken for 



240 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

father and son. And yet, though the elder person was as simply 
clad as the younger, and as simple in manner too, he had an 
indescribable air of one who knew the world, and who would 
not have felt abashed at the governor's dinner table or in 
King William's court, were it possible that his affairs should 
call him thither. But the only thing about him that could be 
fixed upon as remarkable was his staff, which bore the likeness 
of a great black snake, so curiously wrought that it might 
almost be seen to twist and wriggle itself like a living serpent. 
This, of course, must have been an ocular deception, assisted 
by the uncertain light. 

"Come, Goodman Brown," cried his fellow-traveller, "this 
is a dull pace for the beginning of a journey. Take my staff, if 
you are so soon weary." 

"Friend," said the other, exchanging his slow pace for a full 
stop, "having kept covenant by meeting thee here, it is my 
purpose now to return whence I came. I have scruples touching 
the matter thou wot'st of." 

"Sayest thou so?" replied he of the serpent, smiling apart. 
"Let us walk on, nevertheless, reasoning as we go; and if I 
convince thee not thou shalt turn back. We are but a little 
way in the forest yet." ; 

"Too far! too far!" exclaimed the goodman, unconsciously 
resuming his walk. "My father never went into the woods on 
such an errand, nor his father before him. We have been a race 
of honest men and good Christians since the days of the mar- 
tyrs; and shall I be the first of the name of Brown that ever 
took this path and kept" — 

"Such company, thou wouldst say," observed the elder per- 
son, interpreting his pause. "Well said, Goodman Brown! I 
have been as well acquainted with your family as with ever a 
one among the Puritans; and that's no trifle to say. I helped 
your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker 
woman so smartly through the streets of Salem; and it was I 
that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own 
hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip's war. 
They were my good friends, both; and many a pleasant walk 
have we had along this path, and returned merrily after mid- 
night. I would fain be friends with you for their sake." 

"If it be as thou sayest," replied Goodman Brown, "I marvel 



YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN 241 

they never spoke of these matters; or, verily, I marvel not, 
seeing that the least rumor of the sort would have driven them 
from New England. We are a people of prayer, and good 
works to boot, and abide no such wickedness." 

" Wickedness or not," said the traveller with the twisted 
staff, "I have a very general acquaintance here in New Eng- 
land. The deacons of many a church have drunk the com- 
munion wine with me ; the selectmen of divers towns make me 
their chairman ; and a majority of the Great and General Court 
are firm supporters of my interest. The governor and I, too — 
But these are state secrets." 

"Can this be so?" cried Goodman Brown, with a stare of 
amazement at his undisturbed companion. "Howbeit, I have 
nothing to do with the governor and council; they have their 
own ways, and are no rule for a simple husbandman like me. 
But, were I to go on with thee, how should I meet the eye of 
that good old man, our minister, at Salem village? Oh, his 
voice would make me tremble both Sabbath day and lecture 
day." 

Thus far the elder traveller had listened with due gravity; 
but now burst into a fit of irrepressible mirth, shaking himself 
so violently that his snake-like staff actually seemed to wriggle 
in sympathy. 

"Ha! ha! ha!" shouted he again and again; then composing 
himself, "Well, go on, Goodman Brown, go on; but, prithee, 
don't kill me with laughing." 

"Well, then, to end the* matter at once," said Goodman 
Brown, considerably nettled, "there is my wife, Faith. It 
would break her dear little heart; and I'd rather break my 
own." 

"Nay, if that be the case," answered the other, "e'en go thy 
ways, Goodman Brown. I would not for twenty old women 
like the one hobbling before us that Faith should come to any 
harm." 

As he spoke he pointed his staff at a female figure on the 
path, in whom Goodman Brown recognized a very pious and 
exemplary dame, who had taught him his catechism in youth, 
and was still his moral and spiritual adviser, jointly with the 
minister and Deacon Gookin. 

"A marvel, truly, that Goody Cloyse should be so far in the 



242 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

wilderness at nightfall," said he. "But with your leave, friend, 
I shall take a cut through the woods until we have left this 
Christian woman behind. Being a stranger to you, she might 
ask whom I was consorting with and whither I was going." 

"Be it so," said his fellow-traveller. "Betake you to the 
woods, and let me keep the path." 

Accordingly the young man turned aside, but took care to 
watch his companion, who advanced softly along the road until 
he had come within a staff's length of the old dame. She, mean- 
while, was making the best of her way, with singular speed for 
so ag^d a woman, and mumbling some indistinct words — a 
prayer, doubtless — as she went. The traveller put forth his 
staff and touched her withered neck with what seemed the 
serpent's tail. 

"The devil!" screamed the pious old lady. 

"Then Goody Cloyse Ipnrfws her old friend?" observed the 
traveller, -confronting her' aim leaning on his writhing stick. 

"Ah, forsooth, and is it jfoui^worship indeed?" cried the 
good dame. "Yea, truly is itfipd in the very image of my old 
gossip, Goodman Brown, thegrandfather of the silly fellow 
that now is. But — would your worship believe it? — my 
broomstick hath strangely Reappeared, stolen, as I suspect, 
by that unhanged witch, Gomy Cory, and that, too, when I 
was all anointed with the juice of smallage, and cinquefoil, and 
wolf's bane — " 

"Mingled with fine wheat and the fat of a new-born babe," 
said the shape of old Goodman Brown. 

"Ah, your worship knows the recipe," cried the old lady, 
cackling aloud. "So, as I was saying, being all ready for the 
meeting, and no horse to ride on, I made up my mind to foot it; 
for they tell me there is a nice young man to be taken into com- 
munion to-night. But now your good worship will lend me 
your arm, and we shall be there in a twinkling." 

"That can hardly be," answered her friend. "I may not 
spare you my arm, Goody Cloyse; but here is my staff, if you 
will." 

So saying, he threw it down at her feet, where, perhaps, it 
assumed life, being one of the rods which its owner had formerly 
lent to the Egyptian magi. 1 Of this fact, however, Goodman 
Brown could not take cognizance. He had cast up his eyes in 

1 Exodus vii, ii. 



YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN 243 

astonishment, and, looking down again, beheld neither Goody 
Cloyse nor the serpentine staff, but his fellow-traveller alone, 
who waited for him as calmly as if nothing had happened. 

"That old woman taught me my catechism," said the young 
man ; and there was a world of meaning in this simple comment. 

They continued to walk onward, while the elder traveller 
exhorted his companion to make good speed and persevere in 
the path, .discoursing so aptly that his arguments seemed 
rather to spring up in the bosom of his auditor than to be sug- 
gested by himself. As they went, he plucked a branch of maple 
to serve for a walking stick, and began to strip it of the twigs 
and little boughs, which were wet with evening dew. The mo- 
ment his fingers touched them they became strangely withered 
and dried up as with a week's sunshine. Thus the pair pro- 
ceeded, at a good free pace, until suddenly, in a gloomy hollow 
of the road, Goodman Brown sat himself down on the stump of 
a tree and refused to go any farther. 

"Friend," said he, stubbornly, "my mind is made up. Not 
another step will I budge on this errand. What if a wretched 
old woman do choose to go to the devil when I thought she was 
going to heaven : is that any reason why I should quit my dear 
Faith and go after her?" 

"You will think better of this by and by," said his acquaint- 
ance, composedly. "Sit here and rest yourself a while; and 
when you feel like moving again, there is my staff to help you 
along." 

Without more words, he threw his companion the maple 
stick, and was as speedily out of sight as if he had vanished 
into the gloom. The young man sat a few moments by the 
roadside, applauding himself greatly, and thinking with how 
clear a conscience he should meet the minister in his morning 
walk, nor shrink from the eye of good old Deacon Gookin. 
And what calm sleep would be his that very night, which was 
to have been spent so wickedly, but so purely and sweetly 
now, in the arms of Faith! Amidst these pleasant and praise- 
worthy meditations, Goodman Brown heard the tramp of 
horses along the road, and deemed it advisable to conceal 
himself within the verge of the forest, conscious of the guilty 
purpose that had brought him thither, though now so hap- 
pily turned from it. 



244 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

On came the hoof tramps and the voices of the riders, two 
grave old voices, conversing soberly as they drew near. These 
mingled sounds appeared to pass along the road, within a few 
yards of the young man's hiding-place; but, owing doubtless 
to the depth of the gloom at that particular spot, neither the 
travellers nor their steeds were visible. Though their figures 
brushed the small boughs by the wayside, it could not be seen 
that they intercepted, even for a moment, the faint gleam 
from the strip of bright sky athwart which they must have 
passed. Goodman Brown alternately crouched and stood on 
tiptoe, pulling aside the branches and thrusting forth his head 
as far as he durst without discerning so much as a shadow. It 
vexed him the more, because he could have sworn, were such 
a thing possible, that he recognized the voices of the minister 
and Deacon Gookin, jogging along quietly, as they were wont 
to do, when bound to some ordination or ecclesiastical council. 
While yet within hearing, one of the riders stopped to pluck a 
switch. 

"Of the two, reverend sir," said the voice like the deacon's, 
"I had rather miss an ordination dinner than to-night's meet- 
ing. They tell me that some of our community are to be here 
from Falmouth and beyond, and others from Connecticut and 
Rhode Island, besides several of the Indian powwows, who, 
after their fashion, know almost as much deviltry as the best 
of us. Moreover, there is a goodly young woman to be taken 
into communion." 

"Mighty well, Deacon Gookin!" replied the solemn old 
tones of the minister. " Spur up, or we shall be late. Nothing 
can be done, you know, until I get on the ground." 

The hoofs clattered again; and the voices, talking so strangely 
in the empty air, passed on through the forest, where no church 
had ever been gathered or solitary Christian prayed. Whither, 
then, could these holy men be journeying so deep into the 
heathen wilderness? Young Goodman Brown caught hold of a 
tree for support, being ready to sink down on the ground, faint 
and overburdened with the heavy sickness of his heart. He 
looked up to the sky, doubting whether there really was a 
heaven above him. Yet there was the blue arch, and the stars 
brightening in it. 

"With heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm 
against the devil!" cried Goodman Brown. 



YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN 245 

While he still gazed upward into the deep arch of the firma- 
ment and had lifted his hands to pray, a cloud, though no wind 
was stirring, hurried across the zenith and hid the brightening 
stars. The blue sky was still visible, except directly overhead, 
where this black mass of cloud was sweeping swiftly north- 
ward. Aloft in the air, as if from the depths of the cloud, 
came a confused and doubtful sound of voices. Once the lis- 
tener fancied that he could distinguish the accents of towns- 
people of his own, men and women, both pious and ungodly, 
many of whom he had met at the communion table, and had 
seen others rioting at the tavern. The next moment, so indis- 
tinct were the sounds, he doubted whether he had heard aught 
but the murmur of the old forest, whispering without a wind. 
Then came a stronger swell of those familiar tones, heard daily 
in the sunshine at Salem village, but never until now from a 
cloud of night. There was one voice, of a young woman, utter- 
ing lamentations, yet with an uncertain sorrow, and entreating 
for some favor, which, perhaps, it would grieve her to obtain; 
and all the unseen multitude, both saints and sinners, seemed 
to encourage her onward. 

"Faith!" shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of agony and 
desperation; and the echoes of the forest mocked him, crying, 
" Faith ! Faith ! " as if bewildered wretches were seeking her all 
through the wilderness. 

The cry of grief, rage, and terror was yet piercing the night, 
when the unhappy husband held his breath for a response. 
There was a scream, drowned immediately in a louder murmur 
of voices, fading into far-off laughter, as the dark cloud swept 
away, leaving the clear and silent sky above Goodman Brown. 
But something fluttered lightly down through the air and 
caught on the branch of a tree. The young man seized it, and 
beheld a pink ribbon. 

"My Faith is gone!" cried he, after one stupefied moment. 
"There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, 
devil; for to thee is this world given." 

And, maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and 
long, did Goodman Brown grasp his staff and set forth again, 
at such a rate that he seemed to fly along the forest path rather 
than to walk or run. The road grew wilder and drearier and 
more faintly traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the 



246 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with the 
instinct that guides mortal man to evil. The whole forest was 
peopled with frightful sounds — the creaking of the trees, the 
howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes 
the wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave 
a broad roar around the traveller, as if all Nature were laughing 
him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, 
and shrank not from its other horrors. 

"Ha! ha! ha!" roared Goodman Brown when the wind 
laughed at him. "Let us hear which will laugh loudest. Think 
not to frighten me with your deviltry. Come witch, come 
wizard, come Indian powwow, come devil himself, and here 
comes Goodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he 
fear you." 

In truth, all through the haunted forest there could be noth- 
ing more frightful than the figure of Goodman Brown. On he 
flew among the black pines, brandishing his staff with frenzied 
gestures, now giving vent to an inspiration of horrid blasphemy, 
and now shouting forth such laughter as set all the echoes of 
the forest laughing like demons around him. The fiend in his 
own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of 
man. Thus sped the demoniac on his course, until, quivering 
among the trees, he saw a red light before him, as when the 
felled trunks and branches of a clearing have been set on fire, 
and throw up their lurid blaze against the sky, at the hour of 
midnight. He paused, in a lull of the tempest that had driven 
him onward, and heard the swell of what seemed a hymn, roll- 
ing solemnly from a distance with the weight of many voices. 
He knew the tune; it was a familiar one in the choir of the vil- 
lage meeting-house. The verse died heavily away, and was 
lengthened by a chorus, not of human voices, but of all the 
sounds of the benighted wilderness pealing in awful harmony 
together. Goodman Brown „cried out, and his cry was lost to 
his own ear by its unison with the cry of the desert. 

In the interval of silence he stole forward until the light 
glared full upon his eyes. At one extremity of an open space, 
hemmed in by the dark wall of the forest, arose a rock, bearing 
some rude, natural resemblance either to an altar or a pulpit, 
and surrounded by four blazing pines, their tops aflame, their 
stems untouched, like candles at an evening meeting. The 



YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN 247 

mass of foliage that had overgrown the summit of the rock was 
all on fire, blazing high into the night and fitfully illuminating 
the whole field. Each pendent twig and leafy festoon was in a 
blaze. As the red light arose and fell, a numerous congregation 
alternately shone forth, then disappeared in shadow, and 
again grew, as it were, out of the darkness, peopling the heart 
of the solitary woods at once. 

"A grave and dark-clad company," quoth Goodman Brown. 

In truth they were such. Among them, quivering to and fro 
between gloom and splendor, appeared faces that would be 
seen next day at the council board of the province, and others 
which, Sabbath after Sabbath, looked devoutly heavenward, 
and benignantly over the crowded pews, from the holiest 
pulpits in the land. Some affirm that the lady of the governor 
was there. At least there were high dames well known to her, 
and wives of honored husbands, and widows, a great multi- 
tude, and ancient maidens, all of excellent repute, and fair 
young girls, who trembled lest their mothers should espy them. 
Either the sudden gleams of light flashing over the obscure 
field bedazzled Goodman Brown, or he recognized a score of 
the church members of Salem village famous for their especial 
sanctity. Good old Deacon Gookin had arrived, and waited at 
the skirts of that venerable saint, his revered pastor. But, 
irreverently consorting with these grave, reputable, and pious 
people, these elders of the church, these chaste dames and 
dewy virgins, there were men of dissolute lives and women of 
spotted fame, wretches given over to all mean and filthy vice, 
and suspected even of horrid crimes. It was strange to see that 
the good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners 
abashed by the saints. Scattered also among their pale-faced 
enemies were the Indian priests, or powwows, who had often 
scared their native forest with more hideous incantations 
than any known to English witchcraft. 

"But where is Faith?" thought Goodman Brown; and, as 
hope came into his heart, he trembled. 

Another verse of the hymn arose, a slow and mournful strain, 
such as the pious love, but joined to words which expressed all 
that our nature can conceive of sin, and darkly hinted at far 
more. Unfathomable to mere mortals is the lore of fiends. 
Verse after verse was sung; and still the chorus of the desert 



248 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

swelled between like the deepest tone of a mighty organ; and 
with the final peal of that dreadful anthem there came a sound, 
as if the roaring wind, the rushing streams, the howling beasts, 
and every other voice of the unconcerted wilderness were 
mingling and according with the voice of guilty man in homage 
to the prince of all. The four blazing pines threw up a loftier 
flame, and obscurely discovered shapes and visages of horror on 
the smoke wreaths above the impious assembly. At the same 
moment the fire on the rock shot redly forth and formed a 
glowing arch above its base, where now appeared a figure. 
With reverence be it spoken, the figure bore no slight similitude, 
both in garb and manner, to some grave divine of the New 
England churches. 

"Bring forth the converts!" cried a voice that echoed 
through the field and rolled into the forest. 

At the word, Goodman Brown stepped forth from the shadow 
of the trees and approached the congregation, with whom he 
felt a loathful brotherhood by the sympathy of all that was 
wicked in his heart. He could have .well-nigh sworn that the 
shape of his own dead father beckoned him to advance, looking 
downward from a smoke wreath, while a woman, with dim 
features of despair, threw out her hand to warn him back. 
Was it his mother? But he had no power to retreat one step, 
nor to resist, even in thought, when the minister and good old 
Deacon Gookin seized his arms and led him to the blazing rock. 
Thither came also the slender form of a veiled female, led 
between Goody Cloyse, that pious teacher of the catechism, 
and Martha Carrier, who had received the devil's promise to 
be queen of hell. A rampant hag was she. And there stood the 
proselytes beneath the canopy of fire. 

"Welcome, my children," said the dark figure, "to the com- 
munion of your race. Ye have found thus young your nature 
and your destiny. My children, look behind you!" 

They turned; and flashing forth, as it were, in a sheet of 
flame, the fiend worshippers were seen; the smile of welcome 
gleamed darkly on every visage. 

"There," resumed the sable form, "are all whom ye have 
reverenced from youth. Ye deemed them holier than your- 
selves, and shrank from your own sin, contrasting it with their 
lives of righteousness and prayerful aspirations heavenward. 



YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN 249 

Yet here are they all in my worshipping assembly. This 
night it shall be granted you to know their secret deeds: how 
hoary-bearded elders of the church have whispered wanton 
words to the young maids of their households; how many a 
woman, eager for widows' weeds, has given her husband a drink 
at bedtime and let him sleep his last sleep in her bosom; how 
beardless youths have made haste to inherit their fathers' 
wealth; and how fair damsels — blush not, sweet ones — have 
dug little graves in the garden, and bidden me, the sole guest, 
to an infant's funeral. By the sympathy of your human hearts 
for sin ye shall scent out all the places — whether in church, bed- 
chamber, street, field, or forest — where crime has been com- 
mitted, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of 
guilt, one mighty blood spot. Far more than this. It shall be 
yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin, 
the fountain of all wicked arts, and which inexhaustibly sup- 
plies more evil impulses than human power — than my power 
at its utmost — can make manifest in deeds. And now, my 
children, look upon each other." 

They did so; and, by the blaze of the hell-kindled torches, the 
wretched man beheld his Faith, and the wife her husband, 
trembling before that unhallowed altar. 

"Lo, there ye stand, my children," said the figure, in a deep 
and solemn tone, almost sad with its despairing awfulness, as 
if his once angelic nature could yet mourn for our miserable 
race. "Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still 
hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. 
Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happi- 
ness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your 
race." 

"Welcome," repeated the fiend worshippers, in one cry of 
despair and triumph. 

And there they stood, the only pair, as it seemed, who were 
yet hesitating on the verge of wickedness in this dark world. 
A basin was hollowed, naturally, in the rock. Did it contain 
water, reddened by the lurid light? or was it blood? or, per- 
chance, a liquid flame? Herein did the shape of evil dip his 
hand and prepare to lay the mark of baptism upon their 
foreheads, that they might be partakers of the mystery of sin, 
more conscious of the secret guilt of others, both in deed and 



250 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

thought, than they could now be of their own. The husband 
cast one look at his pale wife, and Faith at him. What pol- 
luted wretches would the next glance show them to each other, 
shuddering alike at what they disclosed and what they saw ! 

"Faith! Faith!" cried the husband, "look up to heaven, and 
resist the wicked one." 

Whether Faith obeyed he knew not. Hardly had he spoken 
when he found himself amid calm night and solitude, listening 
to a roar of the wind which died heavily away through the 
forest. He staggered against the rock, and felt it chill and 
damp; while a hanging twig, that had been all on fire, be- 
sprinkled his cheek with the coldest dew. 

The next morning young Goodman Brown came slowly into 
the street of Salem village, staring around him like a be- 
wildered man. The good old minister was taking a walk along 
the graveyard to get an appetite for breakfast and meditate 
his sermon, and bestowed a blessing, as he passed, on Goodman 
Brown. He shrank from the venerable saint as if to avoid an 
anathema. Old Deacon Gookin was at domestic worship, and 
the holy words of his prayer were heard through the open 
window. "What God doth the wizard pray to?" quoth Good- 
man Brown. Goody Cloyse, that excellent old Christian, stood 
in the early sunshine at her own lattice, catechizing a little girl 
who had brought her a pint of morning's milk. Goodman 
Brown snatched away the child as from the grasp of the fiend 
himself. Turning the corner by the meeting-house, he spied the 
head of Faith, with the pink ribbons, gazing anxiously forth, 
and bursting into such joy at sight of him that she skipped along 
the street and almost kissed her husband before the whole vil- 
lage. But Goodman Brown looked sternly and sadly into her 
face, and passed on without a greeting. 

Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only 
dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting? 

Be it so if you will; but, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for 
young Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, 
a distrustful, if not a desperate man did he become from the 
night of that fearful dream. On the Sabbath day, when the 
congregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen 
because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear and 
drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister spoke from 



ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL 251 

the pulpit with power and fervid eloquence, and, with his hand 
on the open Bible, of the sacred truths of our religion, and of 
saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of future bliss or 
misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown turn pale, dread- 
ing lest the roof should thunder down upon the gray blasphemer 
and his hearers. Often, awaking suddenly at midnight, he 
shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or eventide, 
when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered 
to himself-, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. 
And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary 
corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and 
grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides neighbors not a 
few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his 
dying hour was gloom. 

ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL 1 

One of the few incidents of Indian warfare naturally sus- 
ceptible of the moonlight of romance was that expedition under- 
taken for the defence of the frontiers in the year 1725, which 
resulted in the well-remembered "Lovell's Fight." Imagina- 
tion, by casting certain circumstances judicially into the shade, 
may see much to admire in the heroism of a little band who 
gave battle to twice their number in the heart of the enemy's 
country. The open bravery displayed by both parties was in 
accordance with civilized ideas of valor; and chivalry itself 
might not blush to record the deeds of one or two individuals. 
The battle, though so fatal to those who fought, was not unfor- 
tunate in its consequences to the country; for it broke the 
strength of a tribe and conduced to the peace which subsisted 
during several ensuing years. History and tradition are un- 
usually minute in their memorials of this affair; and the captain 
of a scouting party of frontier men has acquired as actual a 
military renown as many a victorious leader of thousands. 
Some of the incidents contained in the following pages will 
be recognized, notwithstanding the substitution of fictitious 
names, but such as have heard, from old men's lips, the fate of 
the few combatants who were in a condition to retreat after 
"Lovell's Fight." 

* Mosses from an Old Manse. 



252 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

The early sunbeams hovered cheerfully upon the tree-tops, 
beneath which two weary and wounded men had stretched their 
limbs the night before. Their bed of withered oak leaves was 
strewn upon the small level space, at the foot of a rock, situated 
near the summit of one of the gentle swells by which the face of 
the country is there diversified. The mass of granite, rearing 
its smooth, flat surface fifteen or twenty feet above their heads, 
was not unlike a gigantic gravestone, upon which the veins 
seemed to form an inscription in forgotten characters. On a 
tract of several acres around this rock, oaks and other hard- 
wood trees had supplied the place of the pines, which were the 
usual growth of the land; and a young and vigorous sapling 
stood close beside the travellers. 

The severe wound of the elder man had probably deprived 
him of sleep ; for, so soon as the first ray of sunshine rested on 
the top of the highest tree, he reared himself painfully from his 
recumbent posture and sat erect. The deep lines of his counte- 
nance and the scattered gray of his hair marked him as past 
the middle age; but his muscular frame would, but for the 
effects of his wound, have been as capable of sustaining fatigue 
as in the early vigor of life. Languor and exhaustion now sat 
upon his haggard features; and the despairing glance which he 
sent forward through the depths of the forest proved his own 
conviction that his pilgrimage was at an end. He next turned 
his eyes to the companion who reclined by his side. The youth 
— for he had scarcely attained the years of manhood — lay, 
with his head upon his arm, in the embrace of an unquiet sleep, 
which a thrill of pain from his wounds seemed each moment on 
the point of breaking. His right hand grasped a musket; and, 
to judge from the violent action of his features, his slumbers 
were bringing back a vision of the conflict of which he was one 
of the few survivors. A shout — deep and loud in his dreaming 
fancy — found its way in an imperfect murmur to his lips ; and, 
starting even at the slight sound of his own voice, he suddenly 
awoke. The first act of reviving recollection was to make 
anxious inquiries respecting the condition of his wounded 
fellow-traveller. The latter shook his head. 

"Reuben, my boy," said he, "this rock beneath which we 
sit will serve for an old hunter's gravestone. There is many 
and many a long mile of howling wilderness before us yet; nor 



ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL 253 

would it avail me anything if the smoke of my own chimney 
were but on the other side of that swell of land. The Indian 
bullet was deadlier than I thought." 

"You are weary with our three days' travel/' replied the 
youth, "and a little longer rest will recruit you. Sit you here 
while I search the woods for the herbs and roots that must be 
our sustenance; and, having eaten, you shall lean on me, and 
we will turn our faces homeward. I doubt not that, with my 
help, you can attain to some one of the frontier garrisons." 

"There is not two days' life in me, Reuben," said the other, 
calmly, " and I will no longer burden you with my useless body, 
when you can scarcely support your own. Your wounds are 
deep and your strength is failing fast; yet, if you hasten on- 
ward alone, you may be preserved. For me there is no hope, 
and I will await death here." 

"If it must be so, I will remain and watch by you," said 
Reuben, .resolutely. 

"No, my son, no," rejoined his companion. "Let the wish 
of a dying man have weight with you ; give me one grasp of your 
hand, and get you hence. Think you that my last moments 
will be eased by the thought that I leave you to die a more 
lingering death? I have loved you like a father, Reuben; and 
at a time like this I should have something of a father's author- 
ity. I charge you to be gone that I may die in peace." 

"And because you have been a father to me, should I there- 
fore leave you to perish and to lie unburied in the wilderness? " 
exclaimed the youth. "No; if your end be in truth approach- 
ing, I will watch by you and receive your parting words. I will 
dig a grave here by the rock, in which, if my weakness overcome 
me, we will rest together; or, if Heaven gives me strength, I will 
seek my way home." 

"In the cities and wherever men dwell," replied the other, 
"they bury their dead in the earth; they hide them from the 
sight of the living; but here, where no step may pass perhaps 
for a hundred years, wherefore should I not rest beneath the 
open sky, covered only by the oak leaves when the autumn 
winds shall strew them? And for a monument, here is this gray 
rock, on which my dying hand shall carve the name of Roger 
Malvin; and the traveller in days to come will know that here 
sleeps a hunter and a warrior. Tarry not, then, for a folly like 



254 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

this, but hasten away, if not for your own sake, for hers who 
will else be desolate." 

Malvin spoke the last few words in a faltering voice, and their 
effect upon his companion was strongly visible. They reminded 
him that there were other and less questionable duties than 
that of sharing the fate of a man whom his death could not 
benefit. Nor can it be affirmed that no selfish feeling strove to 
enter Reuben's heart, though the consciousness made him more 
earnestly resist his companion's entreaties. 

"How terrible to wait the slow approach of death in this 
solitude! " exclaimed he. " A brave man does not shrink in the 
battle; and, when friends stand round the bed, even women 
may die composedly; but here" — 

"I shall not shrink even here, Reuben Bourne," interrupted 
Malvin. "I am a man of no weak heart, and, if I were, there is 
a surer support than that of earthly friends. You are young, 
and life is dear to you. Your last moments will need, comfort 
far more than mine; and when you have laid me in the earth, 
and are alone, and night is settling on the forest, you will feel all 
the bitterness of the death that may now be escaped. But I will 
urge no selfish motive to your generous nature. Leave me for 
my sake, that, having said a prayer for your safety, I may have 
space to settle my account undisturbed by worldly sorrows." 

"And your daughter, — how shall I dare to meet her eye?" 
exclaimed Reuben. "She will ask the fate of her father, whose 
life I vowed to defend with my own. Must I tell her that he 
travelled three days' march with me from the field of battle 
and that then I left him to perish in the wilderness? Were it 
not better to lie down and die by your side than to return safe 
and say this to Dorcas?" 

"Tell my daughter," said Roger Malvin, "that, though your- 
self sore wounded, and weak, and weary, you led my tottering 
footsteps many a mile, and left me only at my earnest entreaty, 
because I would not have your blood upon my soul. Tell her 
that through pain and danger you were faithful, and that, if 
your lifeblood could have saved me, it would have flowed to its 
last drop; and tell her that you will be something dearer than a 
father, and that my blessing is with you both, and that my 
dying eyes can see a long and pleasant path in which you will 
journey together." 



ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL 255 

As Malvin spoke he almost raised himself from the ground, 
and the energy of his concluding words seemed to fill the wild 
and lonely forest with a vision of happiness ; but, when he sank 
exhausted upon his bed of oak leaves, the light which had 
kindled in Reuben's eye was quenched. He felt as if it were 
both sin and folly to think of happiness at such a moment. His 
companion watched his changing countenance, and sought 
with generous art to wile him to his own good. 

"Perhaps I deceive myself in regard to the time I have to 
live," he resumed. "It may be that, with speedy assistance, I 
might recover of my wound. The foremost fugitives must, ere 
this, have carried tidings of our fatal battle to the frontiers, 
and parties will be out to succor those in like condition with 
ourselves. Should you meet one of these and guide them 
hither, who can tell but that I may sit by my own fireside 
again?" 

A mournful smile strayed across the features of the dying 
man as he insinuated that unfounded hope, — which, however, 
was not without its effect on Reuben. No merely selfish mo- 
tive, nor even the desolate condition of Dorcas, could have 
induced him to desert his companion at such a moment — but 
his wishes seized on the thought that Malvin's life might be 
preserved, and his sanguine nature heightened almost to cer- 
tainty the remote possibility of procuring human aid. 

"Surely there is reason, weighty reason, to hope that friends 
are not far distant," he said, half aloud. "There fled one 
coward, unwounded, in the beginning of the fight, and most 
probably he made good speed. Every true man on the frontier 
would shoulder his musket at the news; and, though no party 
may range so far into the woods as this, I shall perhaps en- 
counter them in one day's march. Counsel me faithfully," he 
added, turning to Malvin, in distrust of his own motives. 
"Were your situation mine, would you desert me while life 
remained?" 

"It is now twenty years," replied Roger Malvin, — sighing, 
however, as he secretly acknowledged the wide dissimilarity 
between the two cases, — "it is now twenty years since I 
escaped with one dear friend from Indian captivity near Mon- 
treal. We journeyed many days through the woods, till at 
length overcome with hunger and weariness, my friend lay 



256 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

down and besought me to leave him; for he knew that, if I 
remained, we both must perish; and, with but little hope of 
obtaining succor, I heaped a pillow of dry leaves beneath his 
head and hastened on." 

"And did you return in time to save him?" asked Reuben, 
hanging on Marvin's words as if they were to be prophetic of 
his own success. 

"I did," answered the other. "I came upon the camp of a 
hunting party before sunset of the same day. I guided them 
to the spot where my comrade was expecting death; and he is 
now a hale and hearty man upon his own farm, far within the 
frontiers, while I lie wounded here in the depths of the wilder- 
ness." 

This example, powerful in affecting Reuben's decision, was 
aided, unconsciously to himself, by the hidden strength of many 
another motive. Roger Malvin perceived that the victory was 
nearly won. 

"Now, go, my son, and Heaven prosper you!" he said. 
"Turn not back with your friends when you meet them, lest 
your wounds and weariness overcome you ; but send hitherward 
two or three, that may be spared, to search for me; and believe 
me, Reuben, my heart will be lighter with every step you take 
towards home." Yet there was, perhaps, a change both in his 
countenance and voice as he spoke thus; for, after all, it was a 
ghastly fate to be left expiring in the wilderness. 

Reuben Bourne, but half convinced that he was acting 
rightly, at length raised himself from the ground and prepared 
himself for his departure. And first, though contrary to 
Malvin's wishes, he collected a stock of roots and herbs, which 
had been their only food during the last two days. This useless 
supply he placed within reach of the dying man, for whom, 
also, he swept together a bed of dry oak leaves. Then climbing 
to the summit of the rock, which on one side was rough and 
broken, he bent the oak sapling downward, and bound his 
handkerchief to the topmost branch. This precaution was not 
unnecessary to direct any who might come in search of Malvin; 
for every part of the rock, except its broad, smooth front, was 
concealed at a little distance by the dense undergrowth of the 
forest. The handkerchief had been the bandage of a wound 
upon Reuben's arm; and, as he bound it to the tree, he vowed 



ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL 257 

by the blood that stained it that he would return, either to 
save his companion's life or to lay his body in the grave. He 
then descended, and stood, with downcast eyes, to receive 
Roger Malvin's parting words. 

The experience of the latter suggested much and minute 
advice respecting the youth's journey through the trackless 
forest. Upon this subject he spoke with calm earnestness, as 
if he were sending Reuben to the battle or the chase while he 
himself remained secure at home, and not as if the human 
countenance that was about to leave him were the last he 
would ever behold. But his firmness was shaken before he 
concluded. 

"Carry my blessing to Dorcas, and say that my last prayer 
shall be for her and you. Bid her to have no hard thoughts 
because you left me here," — Reuben's heart smote him, — 
"for that your life would not have weighed with you if its 
sacrifice could have done me good. She will marry you after 
she has mourned a little while for her father; and Heaven grant 
you long and happy days, and may your children's children 
stand round your death bed! And, Reuben," added he, as the 
weakness of mortality made its way at last, "return, when 
your wounds are healed and your weariness refreshed, — re- 
turn to this wild rock, and lay my bones in the grave, and say 
a prayer over them." 

An almost superstitious regard, arising perhaps from the 
customs of the Indians, whose war was with the dead as well 
as the living, was paid by the frontier inhabitants to the rites of 
sepulture; and there are many instances of the sacrifice of life 
in the attempt to bury those who had fallen by the "sword of 
the wilderness." Reuben, therefore, felt the full importance 
of the promise which he most solemnly made to return and 
perform Roger Malvin's obsequies. It was remarkable that 
the latter, speaking his whole heart in his parting words, no 
longer endeavored to persuade the youth that even the speed- 
iest succor might avail to the preservation of his life. Reuben 
was internally convinced that he should see Malvin's living 
face no more. His generous nature would fain have delayed 
him, at whatever risk, till the dying scene were past; but the 
desire of existence and the hope of happiness had strengthened 
in his heart, and he was unable to resist them. 



258 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

"It is enough," said Roger Malvin, having listened to Reu- 
ben's promise. "Go, and God speed you!" 

The youth pressed his hand in silence, turned, and was de- 
parting. His slow and faltering steps, however, had borne him 
but a little way before Malvin's voice recalled him. 

"Reuben, Reuben," said he, faintly; and Reuben returned 
and knelt down by the dying man. 

"Raise me, and let me lean against the rock," was his last 
request. "My face will be turned towards home, and I shall 
see you a moment longer as you pass among the trees." 

Reuben, having made the desired alteration in his compan- 
ion's posture, again began his solitary pilgrimage. He walked 
more hastily at first than was consistent with his strength; for 
a sort of guilty feeling, which sometimes torments men in their 
most justifiable acts, caused him to seek concealment from 
Malvin's eyes; but after he had trodden far upon the rustling 
forest leaves he crept back, impelled by a wild and painful 
curiosity, and, sheltered by the earthly roots of an uptorn tree, 
gazed earnestly at the desolate man. The morning sun was 
unclouded, and the trees and shrubs imbibed the sweet air of 
the month of May; yet there seemed a gloom on Nature's face, 
as if she sympathized with mortal pain and sorrow. Roger 
Malvin's hands were uplifted in a fervent prayer, some of 
the words of which stole through the stillness of the woods 
and entered Reuben's heart, torturing it with an unuttera- 
ble pang. They were the broken accents of a petition for 
his own happiness and that of Dorcas; and, as the youth 
listened, conscience, or something in its similitude, pleaded 
strongly with him to return and lie down again by the rock. 
He felt how hard was the doom of the kind and generous being 
whom he had deserted in his extremity. Death would come like 
the slow approach of a corpse, stealing gradually towards him 
through the forest, and showing its ghastly and motionless 
features from behind a nearer and yet a nearer tree. But such 
must have been Reuben's own fate had he tarried another sun- 
set; and who shall impute blame to him if he shrink from so 
useless a sacrifice? As he gave a parting look, a breeze waved 
the little banner upon the sapling oak and reminded Reuben 
of his vow. 



ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL 259 

Many circumstances combined to retard the wounded trav- 
eller in his way to the frontiers. On the second day the clouds, 
gathering densely over the sky, precluded the possibility of 
regulating his course by the position of the sun; and he knew 
not but that every effort of his almost exhausted strength was 
removing him farther from the home he sought. His scanty 
sustenance was supplied by the berries and other spontaneous 
products of the forest. Herds of deer, it is true, sometimes 
bounded past him, and partridges frequently whirred up before 
his footsteps; but his ammunition had been expended in the 
fight, and he had no means of slaying them. His wounds, irri- 
tated by the constant exertion in which lay the only hope of 
life, wore away his strength and at intervals confused his 
reason. But, even in the wanderings of intellect, Reuben's 
young heart clung strongly to existence; and it was only through 
absolute incapacity of motion that he at last sank down be- 
neath a tree, compelled there to await death. * » 

In this situation he was discovered by a party who, upon 
the first intelligence of the fight, had been despatched to the 
relief of the survivors. They conveyed him to the nearest 
settlement, which chanced to be that of his own residence. 

Dorcas, in the simplicity of the olden time, watched by the 
bedside of her wounded lover, and administered all those com- 
forts that are in the sole gift of woman's heart and hand. 
During several days Reuben's recollection strayed drowsily 
among the perils and hardships through which he had passed, 
and he was incapable of returning definite answers to the in- 
quiries with which many were eager to harass him. No au- 
thentic particulars of the battle had yet been circulated; nor 
could mothers, wives, and children tell whether their loved 
ones were detained by captivity or by the stronger chain of 
death. Dorcas nourished her apprehensions in silence till one 
afternoon when Reuben awoke from an unquiet sleep, and 
seemed to recognize her more perfectly than at any previous 
time. She saw that his intellect had become composed, and she 
could no longer restrain her filial anxiety. 

"My father, Reuben?" she began; but the change in her 
lover's countenance made her pause. 

The youth shrank as if with a bitter pain, and the blood 
gushed vividly into his wan and hollow cheeks. His first im- 



2 6o NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

pulse was to cover his face; but, apparently with a desperate 
effort, he half raised himself and spoke vehemently, defending 
himself against an imaginary accusation. 

"Your father was sore wounded in the battle, Dorcas; and 
he bade me not burden myself with him, but only to lead him 
to the lakeside, that he might quench his thirst and die. But 
I would not desert the old man in his extremity, and, though 
bleeding myself, I supported him ; I gave him half my strength, 
and led him away with me. For three days we journeyed on 
together, and your father was sustained beyond my hopes, but, 
awaking at sunrise on the fourth day, I found him faint and 
exhausted; he was unable to proceed; his life had ebbed away 
fast; and — " 

"He died!" exclaimed Dorcas, faintly. 

Reuben felt it impossible to acknowledge that his selfish love 
of life had hurried him away before her father's fate was de- 
cided. He spoke not; he only bowed his head; and, between 
shame and exhaustion, sank back and hid his face in the pillow. 
Dorcas wept when her fears were thus confirmed; but the 
shock, as it had been long anticipated, was on that account the 
less violent. 

"You dug a grave for my poor father in the wilderness, 
Reuben? " was the question by which her filial piety manifested 
itself. 

"My hands were weak; but I did what I could," replied the 
youth in a smothered tone. "There stands a noble tombstone 
above his head; and I would to Heaven I slept as soundly as 
he!" 

Dorcas, perceiving the wildness of his latter words, inquired 
no further at the time; but her heart found ease in the thought 
that Roger Malvin had not lacked such funeral rites as it was 
possible to bestow. The tale of Reuben's courage and fidelity 
lost nothing when she communicated it to her friends ; and the 
poor youth, tottering from his sick chamber to breathe the 
sunny air, experienced from every tongue the miserable and 
humiliating torture of unmerited praise. All acknowledged 
that he might worthily demand the hand of the fair maiden 
to whose father he had been "faithful unto death"; and, as my 
tale is not of love, it shall suffice to say that in the space of a 
few months Reuben became the husband of Dorcas Malvin. 



ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL 261 

During the marriage ceremony the bride was covered with 
blushes, but the bridegroom's face was pale. 

There was now in the breast of Reuben Bourne an incom- 
municable thought — something which he was to conceal most 
heedfully from her whom he most loved and trusted. He re- 
gretted, deeply and bitterly, the moral cowardice that had 
restrained his words when he was about to disclose the truth 
to Dorcas; but pride, the fear of losing her affection, the dread 
of universal scorn, forbade him to rectify this falsehood. He 
felt that for leaving Roger Malvin he deserved no censure. His 
presence, the gratuitous sacrifice of his own life, would have 
added only another and a needless agony to the last moments 
of the dying man; but concealment had imparted to a justifiable 
act much of the secret effect of guilt; and Reuben, while reason 
told him that he had done right, experienced in no small degree 
the mental horrors which punish the perpetrator of undis- 
covered crime. By a certain association of ideas, he at times 
almost imagined himself a murderer. For years, also, a thought 
would occasionally recur, which, though he perceived all its 
folly and extravagance, he had not power to banish from his 
mind. It was a haunting and torturing fancy that his father- 
in-law was yet sitting at the foot of the rock, on the withered 
forest leaves, alive, and awaiting his pledged assistance. These 
mental deceptions, however, came and went, nor did he ever 
mistake them for realities; but in the calmest and clearest 
moods of his mind he was conscious that he had a deep vow 
unredeemed, and that an unburied corpse was calling to him 
out of the wilderness. Yet such was the consequence of his 
prevarication that he could not obey the call. It was now too 
late to require the assistance of Roger Marvin's friends in per- 
forming his long-deferred sepulture; and superstitious fears, of 
which none were more susceptible than the people of the out- 
ward settlements, forbade Reuben to go alone. Neither did he 
know where in the pathless and illimitable forest to seek that 
smooth and lettered rock at the base of which the body lay: 
his remembrance of every portion of his travel thence was indis- 
tinct, and the latter part had left no impression upon his mind. 
There was, however, a continual impulse, a voice audible only 
to himself, commanding him to go forth and redeem his vow; 
and he had a strange impression that, were he to make the trial, 



262 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

he would be led straight to Malvin's bones. But year after year 
that summons, unheard but felt, was disobeyed. His one secret 
thought became like a chain binding down his spirit and like a 
serpent gnawing into his heart; and he was transformed into a 
sad and downcast yet irritable man. 

In the course of a few years after their marriage changes be- 
gan to be visible in the external prosperity of Reuben and 
Dorcas. The only riches of the former had been his stout heart 
and strong arm; but the latter, her father's sole heiress, had 
made her husband master of a farm, under older cultivation, 
larger, and better stocked than most of the frontier establish- 
ments. Reuben Bourne, however, was a neglectful husband- 
man; and, while the lands of the other settlers became annually 
more fruitful, his deteriorated in the same proportion. The 
discouragements to agriculture were greatly lessened by the 
cessation of Indian war, during which men held the plough in 
one hand and the musket in the other, and were fortunate if the 
products of their dangerous labor were not destroyed, either in 
the field or in the barn, by the savage enemy. But Reuben did 
not profit by the altered condition of the country; nor can it be 
denied that his intervals of industrious attention to his affairs 
were but scantily rewarded with success. The irritability by 
which he had recently become distinguished was another cause 
of his declining prosperity, as it occasioned frequent quarrels 
in his unavoidable intercourse with the neighboring settlers. 
The results of these were innumerable lawsuits; for the people 
of New England, in the earliest stages and wildest circum- 
stances of the country, adopted, whenever attainable, the legal 
mode of deciding their differences. To be brief, the world did not 
go well with Reuben Bourne; and, though not till many years 
after his marriage, he was finally a ruined man, with but one 
remaining expedient against the evil fate that had pursued him. 
He was to throw sunlight into some deep recess of the forest, 
and seek subsistence from the virgin bosom of the wilderness. 

The only child of Reuben and Dorcas was a son, now arrived 
at the age of fifteen years, beautiful in youth, and giving prom- 
ise of a glorious manhood. He was peculiarly qualified for, and 
already began to excel in, the wild accomplishments of frontier 
life. His foot was fleet, his aim true, his apprehension quick, 
his heart glad and high; and all who anticipated the return of 



ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL 263 

Indian war spoke of Cyrus Bourne as a future leader in the 
land. The boy was loved by his father with a deep and silent 
strength, as if whatever was good and happy in his own nature 
had been transferred to his child, carrying his affections with it. 
Even Dorcas, though loving and beloved, was far less dear to 
him ; for Reuben's secret thoughts and insulated emotions had 
gradually made him a selfish man, and he could no longer love 
deeply except where he saw or imagined some reflection or 
likeness of his own mind. In Cyrus he recognized what he had 
himself been in other days; and at intervals he seemed to par- 
take of the boy's spirit, and to be revived with a fresh and 
happy life. Reuben was accompanied by his son in the expedi- 
tion, for the purpose of selecting a tract of land and felling and 
burning the timber, which necessarily preceded the removal of 
the household gods. Two months of autumn were thus occu- 
pied after which Reuben Bourne and his young hunter returned 
to spend their last winter in the settlements. 

It was early in the month of May that the little family 
snapped asunder whatever tendrils of affections had clung to 
inanimate objects, and bade farewell to the few who, in the 
blight of fortune, called themselves their friends. The sadness 
of the parting moment had, to each of the pilgrims, its peculiar 
alleviations. Reuben, a moody man, and misanthropic because 
unhappy, strode onward with his usual stern brow and down- 
cast eye, feeling few regrets and disdaining to acknowledge any. 
Dorcas, while she wept abundantly over the broken ties by 
which her simple and affectionate nature had bound itself to 
everything, felt that the inhabitants of her inmost heart moved 
on with her, and that all else would be supplied wherever she 
might go. And the boy dashed one tear-drop from his eye, and 
thought of the adventurous pleasures of the untrodden forest. 

Oh, who, in the enthusiam of a daydream, has not wished 
that he were a wanderer in a world of summer wilderness, with 
one fair and gentle being hanging lightly on his arm? In youth 
his free and exulting step would know no barrier but the rolling 
ocean or the snow- topped mountains; calmer manhood would 
choose a home where Nature had strewn a double wealth in the 
vale of some transparent stream; and when hoary age, after 
long, long years of that pure life, stole on and found him there, 



264 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

it would find him the father of a race, the patriarch of a people, 
the founder of a mighty nation yet to be. When death, like the 
sweet sleep which we welcome after a day of happiness, came 
over him, his far descendants would mourn over the venerated 
dust. Enveloped by tradition in mysterious attributes, the men 
of future generations would call him godlike; and remote 
posterity would see him standing, dimly glorious, far up the 
valley of a hundred centuries. 

The tangled and gloomy forest through which the personages 
of my tale were wandering differed widely from the dreamer's 
land of fantasy; yet there was something in their way of life 
that Nature asserted as her own, and the gnawing cares which 
went with them from the world were all that now obstructed 
their happiness. One stout and shaggy steed, the bearer of all 
their wealth, did not shrink from the added weight of Dorcas; 
although her hardy breeding sustained her, during the latter 
part of each day's journey, by her husband's side. Reuben and 
his son, their muskets on their shoulders and their axes slung 
behind them, kept an unwearied pace, each watching with a 
hunter's eye for the game that supplied their food. When 
hunger bade, they halted and prepared their meal on the bank 
of some unpolluted forest brook, which, as they knelt down 
with thirsty lips to drink, murmured a sweet unwillingness, 
like a maiden at love's first kiss. They slept beneath a hut of 
branches, and awoke at peep of light refreshed for the toils of 
another day. Dorcas and the boy went on joyously, and even 
Reuben's spirit shone at intervals with an outward gladness; 
but inwardly there was a cold, cold sorrow, which he compared 
to the snowdrifts lying deep in the glens and hollows of the 
rivulets while the leaves were brightly green above. 

Cyrus Bourne was sufficiently skilled in the travel of the 
woods to observe that his father did not adhere to the course 
they had pursued in their expedition of the preceding autumn. 
They were now keeping farther to the north, striking out more 
directly from the settlements, and into a region of which sav- 
age beasts and savage men were as yet the sole possessors. The 
boy sometimes hinted his opinions upon the subject, and 
Reuben listened attentively, and once or twice altered the 
direction of their march in accordance with his son's counsel; 
but, having so done, he seemed ill at ease. His quick and wan- 



ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL 265 

dering glances were sent forward, apparently in search of 
enemies lurking behind the tree trunks; and, seeing nothing 
there, he would cast his eyes backwards as if in fear of some 
pursuer. Cyrus, perceiving that his father gradually resumed 
the old direction, forbore to interfere; nor, though something 
began to weigh upon his heart, did his adventurous nature per- 
mit him to regret the increased length and the mystery of their 
way. 

On the afternoon of the fifth day they halted, and made 
their simple encampment nearly an hour before sunset. The 
face of the country, for the last few miles, had been diversified 
by swells of land resembling huge waves of a petrified sea ; and 
in one of the corresponding hollows, a wild and romantic spot, 
had the family reared their hut and kindled their fire. There is 
something chilling, and yet heart-warming, in the thought of 
these three, united by strong bands of love and insulated from 
all that breathe beside. The dark and gloomy pines looked down 
upon them, and, as the wind swept through their tops, a pitying 
sound was heard in the forest; or did those old trees groan in 
fear that men were come to lay the axe to their roots at last? 
Reuben and his son, while Dorcas made ready their meal, pro- 
posed to wander out in search of game, of which that day's 
march had afforded no supply. The boy, promising not to quit 
the vicinity of the encampment, bounded off with a step as 
light and elastic as that of the deer he hoped to slay; while his 
father, feeling a transient happiness as he gazed after him, was 
about to pursue an opposite direction. Dorcas, in the mean- 
while, had seated herself near their fire of fallen branches, upon 
the mossgrown and mouldering trunk of a tree uprooted years 
before. Her employment, diversified by an occasional glance 
at the pot, now beginning to simmer over the blaze, was the 
perusal of the current year's Massachusetts Almanac, which, 
with the exception of an old black-letter Bible, comprised all 
the literary wealth of the family. None pay a greater regard 
to arbitrary divisions of time than those who are excluded from 
society; and Dorcas mentioned, as if the information were of 
importance, that it was now the twelfth of May. Her husband 
started. 

"The twelfth of May! I should remember it well," muttered 
he, while many thoughts occasioned a momentary confusion in 



266 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

his mind. "Where am I? Whither am I wandering? Where 
did I leave him? " 

Dorcas, too well accustomed to her husband's wayward 
moods to note any peculiarity of demeanor, now laid aside the 
almanac and addressed him in that mournful tone which the 
tender hearted appropriate to griefs long cold and dead. 

"It was near this time of the month, eighteen years ago, that 
my poor father left this world for a better. He had a kind 
arm to hold his head and a kind voice to cheer him, Reuben, in 
his last moments; and the thought of the faithful care you took 
of him has comforted me many a time since. Oh, death would 
have been awful to a solitary man in a wild place like this!" 

"Pray Heaven, Dorcas," said Reuben, in a broken voice, — 
"pray Heaven that neither of us three dies solitary and lies 
unburied in this howling wilderness!" And he hastened away, 
leaving her to watch the fire beneath the gloomy pines.. 

Reuben Bourne's rapid pace gradually slackened as the 
pang, unintentionally inflicted by the words of Dorcas, became 
less acute. Many strange reflections, however, thronged upon 
him; and, straying onward rather like a sleep walker than a 
hunter, it was attributable to no care of his own that his devi- 
ous course kept him in the vicinity of the encampment. His 
steps were imperceptibly led almost in a circle; nor did he 
observe that he was on the verge of a tract of land heavily tim- 
bered, but not with pine-trees. The place of the latter was here 
supplied by oaks and other of the harder woods; and around 
their roots clustered a dense and bushy undergrowth, leaving, 
however, barren spaces between the trees, thick strewn with 
withered leaves. Whenever the rustling of the branches or the 
creaking of the trunks made a sound, as if the forest were wak- 
ing from slumber, Reuben instinctively raised the musket that 
rested on his arm, and cast a quick, sharp glance on every side; 
but, convinced by a partial observation that no animal was 
near, he would again give himself up to his thoughts. He was 
musing on the strange influence that had led him away from 
his premeditated course, and so far into the depths of the wil- 
derness. Unable to penetrate to the secret place of his soul 
where his motives lay hidden, he believed that a supernatural 
voice had called him onward, and that a supernatural power 
had obstructed his retreat. He trusted that it was Heaven's 



ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL 267 

intent to afford him an opportunity of expiating his sin; he 
hoped that he might find the bones so long unburied; and that, 
having laid the earth over them, peace would throw its sunlight 
into the sepulchre of his heart. From these thoughts he was 
aroused by a rustling in the forest at some distance from the 
spot to which he had wandered. Perceiving the motion of some 
object behind a thick veil of undergrowth, he fired, with the 
instinct of a hunter and the aim of a practiced marksman. A 
low moan, which told his success, and by which even animals 
can express their dying agony, was unheeded 'by Reuben 
Bourne. What were the recollections now breaking upon him? 
The thicket into which Reuben had fired was near the sum- 
mit of a swell of land, and was clustered around the base of a 
rock, which, in the shape and smoothness of one of its surfaces, 
was not unlike a gigantic gravestone. As if reflected in a mirror, 
its likeness was in Reuben's memory. He even recognized the 
veins which seemed to form an inscription in forgotten char- 
acters: everything remained the same, except that a thick 
covert of bushes shrouded the lower part of the rock, and would 
have hidden Roger Malvin had he still been sitting there. Yet 
in the next moment Reuben's eye was caught by another 
change that time had effected since he last stood where he was 
now standing again behind the earthy roots of the uptorn tree. 
The sapling to which he had bound the bloodstained symbol 
of his vow had increased and strengthened into an oak, far 
indeed from its maturity, but with no mean spread of shadowy 
branches. There was one singularity observable in this tree 
which made Reuben tremble. The middle and lower branches 
were in luxuriant life, and an excess of vegetation had fringed 
the trunk almost to the ground; but a blight had apparently 
stricken the upper part of the oak, and the very topmost bough 
was withered, sapless, and utterly dead. Reuben remembered 
how the little banner had fluttered on that topmost bough, 
when it was green and lovely, eighteen years before. Whose 
guilt had blasted it? 

Dorcas, after the departure of the two hunters, continued 
her preparations for their evening repast. Her sylvan table 
was the moss-covered trunk of a large fallen tree, on the broad- 
est part of which she had spread a snow-white cloth and 



268 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

arranged what were left of the bright pewter vessels that had 
been her pride in the settlements. It had a strange aspect, 
that one little spot of homely comfort in the desolate heart of 
Nature. The sunshine yet lingered upon the higher branches 
of the trees that grew on rising ground; but the shadows of 
evening had deepened into the hollow where the encampment 
was made, and the firelight began to redden as it gleamed up 
the tall trunks of the pines or hovered on the dense and obscure 
mass of foliage that circled round the spot. The heart of Dorcas 
was not sad; for she felt that it was better to journey in the 
wilderness with two whom she loved than to be a lonely woman 
in a crowd that cared not for her. As she busied herself in 
arranging seats of mouldering wood, covered with leaves, for 
Reuben and her son, her voice danced through the gloomy 
forest in the measure of a song that she had learned in youth. 
The rude melody, the production of a bard who won no name, 
was descriptive of a winter evening in a frontier cottage, when, 
secured from savage inroad by the high-piled snow-drifts, the 
family rejoiced by their own fireside. The whole song possessed 
the nameless charm peculiar to unborrowed thought, but four 
continually-recurring lines shone out from the rest like the 
blaze of the hearth whose joys they celebrated. Into them, 
working magic with a few simple words, the poet had instilled 
the very essence of domestic love and household happiness, 
and they were poetry and picture joined in one. As Dorcas 
sang, the walls of her forsaken home seemed to encircle her; 
she no longer saw the gloomy pines, nor heard the wind which 
still, as she began each verse, sent a heavy breath through the 
branches, and died away in a hollow moan from the burden of 
the song. She was aroused by the report of a gun in the vicin- 
ity of the encampment; and either the sudden sound, or her 
loneliness by the glowing fire, caused her to tremble violently. 
The next moment she laughed in the pride of a mother's heart. 

" My beautiful young hunter ! My boy has slain a deer ! " she 
exclaimed, recollecting that in the direction whence the shot 
proceeded Cyrus had gone to the chase. 

She waited a reasonable time to hear her son's light step 
bounding over the rustling leaves to tell of his success. But he 
did not immediately appear; and she sent her cheerful voice 
among the trees in search of him. 



ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL 269 

" Cyrus! Cyrus!" 

His coming was still delayed; and she determined, as the 
report had apparently been very near, to seek for him in per- 
son. Her assistance, also, might be necessary in bringing home 
the venison which she flattered herself he had obtained. She 
therefore set forward, directing her steps by the long-past 
sound, and singing as she went, in order that the boy might be 
aware of her approach and run to meet her. From behind the 
trunk of every tree, and from every hiding-place in the thick 
foliage of the undergrowth, she hoped to discover the counte- 
nance of her son, laughing with the sportive mischief that is 
born of affection. The sun was now beneath the horizon, and 
the light that came down among the leaves was sufficiently dim 
to create many illusions in her expecting fancy. Several times 
she seemed indistinctly to see his face gazing out from among 
the leaves; and once she imagined that he stood beckoning to 
her at the base of a craggy rock. Keeping her eyes on this 
object, however, it proved to be no more than the trunk of an 
oak fringed to the very ground with little branches, one of 
which, thrust out farther than the rest, was shaken by the 
breeze. Making her way round the foot of the rock, she sud- 
denly found herself close to her husband, who had approached 
in another direction. Leaning upon the butt of his gun, the 
muzzle of which rested upon the withered leaves, he was appar- 
ently absorbed in the contemplation of some object at his feet. 

"How is this, Reuben? Have you slain the deer and fallen 
asleep over him?" exclaimed Dorcas, laughing cheerfully, on 
her first slight observation of his posture and appearance. 

He stirred not, neither did he turn his eyes towards her; and 
a cold, shuddering fear, indefinite in its source and object, 
began to creep into her blood. She now perceived that her 
husband's face was ghastly pale, and his features were rigid, 
as if incapable of assuming any other expression than the 
strong despair which had hardened upon them. He gave not the 
slightest evidence that he was aware of her approach. 

"For the love of Heaven, Reuben, speak to me!" cried 
Dorcas; and the strange sound of her own voice affrighted her 
even more than the dead silence. 

Her husband started, stared into her face, drew her to the 
front of the rock, and pointed with his finger. 



270 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

Oh, there lay the boy, asleep, but dreamless, upon the fallen 
forest leaves! His cheek rested upon his arm — his curled locks 
were thrown back from his brow — his limbs were slightly 
relaxed. Had a sudden weariness overcome the youthful 
hunter? Would his mother's voice arouse him? She knew that 
it was death. 

"This broad rock is the gravestone of your near kindred, 
Dorcas," said her husband. "Your tears will fall at once over 
your father and your son." 

She heard him not. With one wild shriek, that seemed to 
force its way from the sufferer's inmost soul, she sank insensible 
by the side of her dead boy. At that moment the withered top- 
most bough of the oak loosened itself in the stilly air, and fell 
in soft, light fragments upon the rock, upon the leaves, upon 
Reuben, upon his wife and child, and upon Roger Marvin's 
bones. Then Reuben's heart was stricken, and the tears gushed 
Out like water from a rock. The vow that the wounded youth 
had made the blighted man had come to redeem. His sin was 
expiated, — the curse was gone from him; and in the hour 
when he had shed blood dearer to him than his own, a prayer, 
the first for years, went up to Heaven from the lips of Reuben 
Bourne. 

RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER 1 

[from the writings of aubepine] 

We do not remember to have seen any translated specimens 
of the productions of M. de 1' Aubepine — a fact the less to be 
wondered at, as his very name is unknown to many of his own 
countrymen as well as to the student of foreign literature. As a 
writer, he seems to occupy an unfortunate position between 
the Transcendentalists (who, under one name or another, have 
their share in all the current literature of the world) and the 
great body of pen-and-ink men who address the intellect and 
sympathies of the multitude. If not too refined, at all events 
too remote, too shadowy, and unsubstantial in his modes of 
development to suit the taste of the latter class, and yet too 

1 Mosses from an Old Manse. Aub6pine (French for "hawthorn") was one of 
the pen-names assumed by Hawthorne. The titles in the second paragraph are 
the French equivalents for the titles of some of the Twice-Told Tales. 



RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER 271 

popular to satisfy the spiritual or metaphysical requisitions of 
the former, he must necessarily find himself without an audi- 
ence, except here and there an individual or possibly an iso- 
lated clique. His writings, to do them justice, are not altogether 
destitute of fancy and originality; they might have won him 
greater reputation but for an inveterate love of allegory, which 
is apt to invest his plots and characters with the aspect of scen- 
ery and people in the clouds, and to steal away the human 
warmth out of his conceptions. His fictions are sometimes his- 
torical, sometimes of the present day, and sometimes, so far 
as can be discovered, have little or no reference either to time 
or space. In any case, he generally contents himself with a 
very slight embroidery of outward manners, — the faintest 
possible counterfeit of real life, — and endeavors to create an 
interest by some less obvious peculiarity of the subject. Occa- 
sionally a breath of Nature, a raindrop of pathos and tender- 
ness, or a gleam of humor, will find its way into the midst of 
his fantastic imagery, and make us feel as if, after all, we were 
yet within the limits of our native earth. We will only add to 
this very cursory notice that M. de PAubepine's productions, 
if the reader chance to take them in precisely the proper point 
of view, may amuse a leisure hour as well as those of a brighter 
man ; if otherwise, they can hardly fail to look excessively like 
nonsense. 

Our author is voluminous; he continues to write and publish 
with as much praiseworthy and indefatigable prolixity as if his 
efforts were crowned with the brilliant success that so justly 
attends those of Eugene Sue. His first appearance was by a 
collection of stories in a long series of volumes entitled " Contes 
deux fois racontes." The titles of some of his more recent 
works (we quote from memory) are as follows: "Le Voyage 
Celeste a Chemin de Fer," 3 torn., 1838; "Le nouveau Pere 
Adam et la nouvelle Mere Eve," 2 torn., 1839; "Roderic; ou le 
Serpent a l'estomac," 2 torn., 1840; "Le Culte du Feu," a folio 
volume of ponderous research into the religion and ritual of the 
old Persian Ghebers, published in 1841 ; "La Soiree du Chateau 
en Espagne," 1 torn., 8vo, 1842; and "L'Artiste du Beau; ou le 
Papillon Mecanique," 5 torn., 4to, 1843. Our somewhat weari- 
some perusal of this startling catalogue of volumes has left 
behind it a certain personal affection and sympathy, though 



272 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

by no means admiration, for M. de PAubepine; and we would 
fain do the little in our power towards introducing him favor- 
ably to the American public. The ensuing tale is a translation 
of his "Beatrice; ou la Belle Empoisonneuse," recently pub- 
lished in "La Revue Anti-Aristocratique." This journal, 
edited by the Comte de Bearhaven, has for some years past 
led the defence of liberal principles and popular rights with a 
faithfulness and ability worthy of all praise. 

A young man, named Giovanni Guasconti, came, very long 
ago, from the more southern region of Italy, to pursue his 
studies at the University of Padua. Giovanni, who had but a 
scanty supply of gold ducats in his pocket, took lodgings in a 
high and gloomy chamber of an old edifice which looked not 
unworthy to have been the palace of a Paduan noble, and which, 
in fact, exhibited over its entrance the armorial bearings of a 
family long since extinct. The young stranger, who was not 
unstudied in the great poem of his country, recollected that 
one of the ancestors of this family, and perhaps an occupant 
of this very mansion, had been pictured by Dante as a par- 
taker of the immortal agonies of his Inferno. These reminis- 
cences and associations, together with the tendency to heart- 
break natural to a young man for the first time out of his 
native sphere, caused Giovanni to sigh heavily as he looked 
around the desolate and ill-furnished apartment. 

"Holy Virgin, signor!" cried old Dame Lisabetta, who, won 
by the youth's remarkable beauty of person, was kindly en- 
deavoring to give the chamber a habitable air, "what a sigh 
was that to come out of a young man's heart! Do you find this 
old mansion gloomy? For the love of Heaven, then, put your 
head out of the window, and you will see as bright sunshine as 
you have left in Naples." 

Guasconti mechanically did as the old woman advised, but 
could not quite agree with her that the Paduan sunshine was as 
cheerful as that of southern Italy. Such as it was, however, it 
fell upon a garden beneath the window and expended its fos- 
tering influences on a variety of plants, which seemed to have 
been cultivated with exceeding care. 

"Does this garden belong to the house?" asked Giovanni. 

"Heaven forbid, signor, unless it were fruitful of better pot 



RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER 273 

herbs than any that grow there now," answered old Lisabetta. 
"No; that garden is cultivated by the own hands of Signor 
Giacomo Rappaccini, the famous doctor, who, I warrant him, 
has been heard of as far as Naples. It is said that he distils these 
plants into medicines that are as potent as a charm. Often- 
times you may see the signor doctor at work, and perchance the 
signora, his daughter, too, gathering the strange flowers that 
grow in the garden." 

The old woman had now done what she could for the aspect 
of the chamber; and, commending the young man to the pro- 
tection of the saints, took her departure. 

Giovanni still found no better occupation than to look down 
into the garden beneath his window. From its appearance, he 
judged it to be one of those botanic gardens which were of 
earlier date in Padua than elsewhere in Italy or in the world. 
Or, not improbably, it might once have been the pleasure- 
place of an opulent family; for there was the ruin of a marble 
fountain in the centre, sculptured with rare art, but so wofully 
shattered that it was impossible to trace the original design 
from the chaos of remaining fragments. The water, however, 
continued to gush and sparkle into the sunbeams as cheerfully 
as ever. A little gurgling sound ascended to the young man's 
window, and made him feel as if the fountain were an immortal 
spirit that sung its song unceasingly and without heeding the 
vicissitudes around it, while one century embodied it in marble 
and another scattered the perishable garniture on the soil. All 
about the pool into which the water subsided grew various 
plants, that seemed to require a plentiful supply of moisture 
for the nourishment of gigantic leaves, and, in some instances, 
flowers gorgeously magnificent. There was one shrub in par- 
ticular, set in a marble vase in the midst of the pool, that bore 
a profusion of purple blossoms, each of which had the lustre and 
richness of a gem; and the whole together made a show so 
resplendent that it seemed enough to illuminate the garden, 
even had there been no sunshine. Every portion of the soil was 
peopled with plants and herbs, which, if less beautiful, still 
bore tokens of assiduous care, as if all had their individual 
virtues, known to the scientific mind that fostered them. Some 
were placed in urns, rich with old carving, and others in com- 
mon garden pots; some crept serpent-like along the ground or 



274 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

climbed on high, using whatever means of ascent was offered 
them. One plant had wreathed itself round a statue of Vertum- 
nus, which was thus quite veiled and shrouded in a drapery of 
hanging foliage, so happily arranged that it might have served 
a sculptor for a study. 

While Giovanni stood at the window he heard a rustling 
behind a screen of leaves, and became aware that a person was 
at work in the garden. His figure soon emerged into view, and 
showed itself to be that of no common laborer, but a tall, 
emaciated, sallow, and sickly-looking man, dressed in a schol- 
ar's garb of black. He was beyond the middle term of life, 
with gray hair, a thin, gray beard, and a face singularly marked 
with intellect and cultivation, but which could never, even in 
his more youthful days, have expressed much warmth of heart. 

Nothing could exceed the intentness with which this scien- 
tific gardener examined every shrub which grew in his path: it 
seemed as if he was looking into their inmost nature, making 
observations in regard to their creative essence, and discover- 
ing why one leaf grew in this shape and another in that, and 
wherefore such and such flowers differed among themselves in 
hue and perfume. Nevertheless, in spite of this deep intelligence 
on his part, there was no approach to intimacy between himself 
and these vegetable existences. On the contrary, he avoided 
their actual touch or the direct inhaling of their odors with a 
caution that impressed Giovanni most disagreeably; for the 
man's demeanor was that of one walking among malignant 
influences, such as savage beasts, or deadly snakes, or evil 
spirits, which, should he allow them one moment of license, 
would wreak upon him some terrible fatality. It was strangely 
frightful to the young man's imagination to see this air of 
insecurity in a person cultivating a garden, that most simple 
and innocent of human toils, and which had been alike the joy 
and labor of the unfallen parents of the race. Was this garden, 
then, the Eden of the present world? And this man, with such 
a perception of harm in what his own hands caused to grow, — 
was he the Adam? 

The distrustful gardener, while plucking away the dead 
leaves or pruning the too luxuriant growth of the shrubs, de- 
fended his hands with a pair of thick gloves. Nor were these 
his only armor. When, in his walk through the garden, he 



RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER 275 

came to the magnificent plant that hung its purple gems beside 
the marble fountain, he placed a kind of mask over his mouth 
and nostrils, as if all this beauty did but conceal a deadlier 
malice; but, finding his task still too dangerous, he drew back, 
removed the mask, and called loudly, but in the infirm voice 
of a person affected with inward disease, — 

"Beatrice! Beatrice!" 

"Here am I, my father. What would you?" cried a rich and 
youthful voice from the window of the opposite house — a 
voice as rich as a tropical sunset, and which made Giovanni, 
though he knew not why, think of deep hues of purple or crim- 
son and of perfumes heavily delectable. "Are you in the 
garden? " 

"Yes, Beatrice," answered the gardener, "and I need your 
help." 

Soon there emerged from under a sculptured portal the 
figure of a young girl, arrayed with as much richness of taste 
as the most splendid of the flowers, beautiful as the day, and 
with a bloom so deep and vivid that one shade more would 
have been too much. She looked redundant with life, health, 
and energy; all of which attributes were bound down and com- 
pressed, as it were, and girdled tensely, in their luxuriance, by 
her virgin zone. Yet Giovanni's fancy must have grown mor- 
bid while he looked down into the garden; for the impression 
which the fair stranger made upon him was as if here were 
another flower, the human sister of those vegetable ones, as 
beautiful as they, more beautiful than the richest of them, but 
still to be touched only with a glove, nor to be approached with- 
out a mask. As Beatrice came down the garden path, it was 
observable that she handled and inhaled the odor of several of 
the plants which her father had most sedulously avoided. 

"Here, Beatrice," said the latter, "see how many needful 
offices require to be done to our chief treasure. Yet, shattered 
as I am, my life might pay the penalty of approaching it so 
closely as circumstances demand. Henceforth, I fear, this 
plant must be consigned to your sole charge." 

"And gladly will I undertake it," cried again the rich tones 
of the young lady, as she bent towards the magnificent plant 
and opened her arms as if to embrace it. "Yes, my sister, my 
splendor, it shall be Beatrice's task to nurse and serve thee; 



276 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

and thou shalt reward her with thy kisses and perfumed breath, 
which to her is as the breath of life." 

Then, with all the tenderness in her manner that was so 
strikingly expressed in her words, she busied herself with such 
attentions as the plant seemed to require ; and Giovanni, at his 
lofty window, rubbed his eyes and almost doubted whether it 
were a girl tending her favorite flower, or one sister performing 
the duties of affection to another. The scene soon terminated. 
Whether Dr. Rappaccini had finished his labors in the garden, 
or that his watchful eye had caught the stranger's face, he now 
took his daughter's arm and retired. Night was already closing 
in; oppressive exhalations seemed to proceed from the plants 
and steal upward past the open window; and Giovanni, closing 
the lattice, went to his couch and dreamed of a rich flower and 
beautiful girl. Flower and maiden were different, and yet the 
same, and fraught with some strange peril in either shape. 

But there is an influence in the light of morning that tends to 
rectify whatever errors of fancy, or even of judgment, we may 
have incurred during the sun's decline, or among the shadows 
of the night, or in the less wholesome glow of moonshine. 
Giovanni's first movement, on starting from sleep, was to throw 
open the window and gaze down into the garden which his 
dreams had made so fertile of mysteries. He was surprised 
and a little ashamed to find how real and matter-of-fact an 
affair it proved to be, in the first rays of the sun which gilded 
the dew-drops that hung upon leaf and blossom, and, while 
giving a brighter beauty to each rare flower, brought every- 
thing within the limits of ordinary experience. The young man 
rejoiced that, in the heart of the barren city, he had the privi- 
lege of overlooking this spot of lovely and luxuriant vegetation. 
It would serve, he said to himself, as a symbolic language to 
keep him in communion with Nature. • Neither the sickly and 
thoughtworn Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini, it is true, nor his 
brilliant daughter, were now visible; so that Giovanni could 
not determine how much of the singularity which he attributed 
to both was due to their own qualities and how much to his 
wonder-working fancy; but he was inclined to take a most 
rational view of the whole matter. 

In the course of the day he paid his respects to Signor Pietro 
Baglioni, professor of medicine in the university, a physician 



RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER 277 

of eminent repute, to whom Giovanni had brought a letter of 
introduction. The professor was an elderly personage, appar- 
ently of genial nature, and habits that might almost be called 
jovial. He kept the young man to dinner, and made himself 
very agreeable by the freedom and liveliness of his conversation, 
especially when warmed by a flask or two of Tuscan wine. 
Giovanni, conceiving that men of science, inhabitants of the 
same city, must needs be on familiar terms with one another, 
took an opportunity to mention the name of Dr. Rappaccini. 
But the professor did not respond with so much cordiality as 
he had anticipated. 

"Ill would it become a teacher of the divine art of medicine," 
said Professor Pietro Baglioni, in answer to a question of 
Giovanni, "to withhold due and well-considered praise of a 
physician so eminently skilled as Rappaccini ; but, on the other 
hand, I should answer it but scantily to my conscience were I to 
permit a worthy youth like yourself, Signor Giovanni, the son 
of an ancient friend, to imbibe erroneous ideas respecting a 
man who might hereafter chance to hold your life and death in 
his hands. The truth is, our worshipful Dr. Rappaccini has as 
much science as any member of the faculty — with perhaps one 
single exception — in Padua, or all Italy ; but there are certain 
grave objections to his professional character." 

"And what are they?" asked the young man. 

"Has my friend Giovanni any disease of body or heart, that 
he is so inquisitive about physicians?" said the professor, with 
a smile. "But as for Rappaccini, it is said of him — and I, 
who know the man well, can answer for its truth — that he 
cares infinitely more for science than for mankind. His patients 
are interesting to him only as subjects for some new experiment. 
He would sacrifice human life, his own among the rest, or what- 
ever else was dearest to him, for the sake of adding so much as 
a grain of mustard seed to the great heap of his accumulated 
knowledge." 

"Methinks he is an awful man indeed," remarked Guasconti, 
mentally recalling the cold and purely intellectual aspect of 
Rappaccini. "And yet, worshipful professor, is it not a noble 
spirit? Are there many men capable of so spiritual a love of 
science?" 

"God forbid," answered the professor, somewhat testily; 



278 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

"at least, unless they take sounder views of the healing art 
than those adopted by Rappaccini. It is his theory that all 
medicinal virtues are comprised within those substances which 
we term vegetable poisons. These he cultivates with his own 
hands, and is said even to have produced new varieties of 
poison, more horribly deleterious than Nature, without the 
assistance of this learned person, would ever have plagued the 
world withal. That the signor doctor does less mischief than 
might be expected with such dangerous substances is undeni- 
able. Now and then, it must be owned, he has effected, or 
seemed to effect, a marvellous cure; but, to tell you my private 
mind, Signor Giovanni, he should receive little credit for such 
instances of success, — they being probably the work of 
chance, — but should be held strictly accountable for his 
failures, which may justly be considered his own work." 

The youth might have taken Baglioni's opinions with many 
grains of allowance had he known that there was a professional 
warfare of long continuance between him and Dr. Rappaccini, 
in which the latter was generally thought to have gained the 
advantage. If the reader be inclined to judge for himself, we 
refer him to certain black-letter tracts on both sides, preserved 
in the medical department of the University of Padua. 

"I know not, most learned professor," returned Giovanni, 
after musing on what had been said of Rappaccini's exclusive 
zeal for science, — "I know not how dearly this physician may 
love his art; but surely there is one object more dear to him. 
He has a daughter." 

"Aha!" cried the professor, with a laugh. "So now our 
friend Giovanni's secret is out. You have heard of this daugh- 
ter, whom all the young men in Padua are wild about, though 
not half a dozen have ever had the good hap to see her face. I 
know little of the Signora Beatrice save that Rappaccini is 
said to have instructed her deeply in his science, and that, 
young and beautiful as fame reports her, she is already qualified 
to fill a professor's chair. Perchance her father destines her 
for mine! Other absurd rumors there be, not worth talking 
about or listening to. So now, Signor Giovanni, drink off your 
glass of lachryma." 

Guasconti returned to his lodgings somewhat heated with 
the wine he had quaffed, and which caused his brain to swim 



RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER 279 

with strange fantasies in reference to Dr. Rappaccini and the 
beautiful Beatrice. On his way, happening to pass by a flor- 
ist's, he bought a fresh bouquet of flowers. 

Ascending to his chamber, he seated himself near the win- 
dow, but within the shadow thrown by the depth of the wall, 
so that he could look down into the garden with little risk of 
being discovered. All beneath his eye was a solitude. The 
strange plants were basking in the sunshine, and now and then 
nodding gently to one another, as if in acknowledgment of 
sympathy and kindred. In the midst, by the shattered foun- 
tain, grew the magnificent shrub, with its purple gems cluster- 
ing all over it; they glowed in the air, and gleamed back again 
out of the depths of the pool, which thus seemed to overflow 
with colored radiance from the rich reflection that was steeped 
in it. At first, as we have said, the garden was a solitude. Soon, 
however, — as Giovanni had half hoped, half feared, would be 
the case, — a figure appeared beneath the antique sculptured 
portal, and came down between the rows of plants, inhaling 
their various perfumes as if she were one of those beings of old 
classic fable that lived upon sweet odors. On again beholding 
Beatrice, the young man was even startled to perceive how 
much her beauty exceeded his recollection of it; so brilliant, so 
vivid, was its character, that she glowed amid the sunlight, and, 
as Giovanni whispered to himself, positively illuminated the 
more shadowy intervals of the garden path. Her face being 
now more revealed than on the former occasion, he was struck 
by its expression of simplicity and sweetness, — qualities that 
had not entered into his idea of her character, and which made 
him ask anew what manner of mortal she might be. Nor did 
he fail again to observe, or imagine, an analogy between the 
beautiful girl and the gorgeous shrub that hung its gemlike 
flowers over the fountain, — a resemblance which Beatrice 
seemed to have indulged a fantastic humor in heightening, 
both by the arrangement of her dress and the selection of its 
hues. 

Approaching the shrub, she threw open her arms, as with a 
passionate ardor, and drew its branches into an intimate em- 
brace — so intimate that her features were hidden in its leafy 
bosom and her glistening ringlets all intermingled with the 
flowers. 



280 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

"Give me thy breath, my sister," exclaimed Beatrice; "for 
I am faint with common air. And give me this flower of thine, 
which I separate with gentlest fingers from the stem and place 
it close beside my heart." 

With these words the beautiful daughter of Rappaccini 
plucked one of the richest blossoms of the shrub, and was about 
to fasten it in her bosom. But now, unless Giovanni's draughts 
of wine had bewildered his senses, a singular incident occurred. 
A small orange-colored reptile, of the lizard or chameleon 
species, chanced to be creeping along the path, just at the feet 
of Beatrice. It appeared to Giovanni, — but, at the distance 
from which he gazed, he could scarcely have seen anything so 
minute, — it appeared to him, however, that a drop or two of 
moisture from the broken stem of the flower descended upon 
the lizard's head. For an instant the reptile contorted itself 
violently, and then lay motionless in the sunshine. Beatrice 
observed this remarkable phenomenon, and crossed herself, 
sadly, but without surprise; nor did she therefore hesitate to 
arrange the fatal flower in her bosom. There it blushed, and 
almost glimmered with the dazzling effect of a precious stone, 
adding to her dress and aspect the one appropriate charm which 
nothing else in the world could have supplied. But Giovanni, 
out of the shadow of his window, bent forward and shrank 
back, and murmured and trembled. 

"Am I awake? Have I my senses?" said he to himself. 
"What is this being? Beautiful shall I call her, or inexpres- 
sibly terrible?" 

Beatrice now strayed carelessly through the garden, ap- 
proaching closer beneath Giovanni's window, so that he was 
compelled to thrust his head quite out of its concealment in 
order to gratify the intense and painful curiosity which she 
excited. At this moment there came a beautiful insect over the 
garden wall; it had, perhaps, wandered through the city, and 
found no flowers or verdure among those antique haunts of men 
until the heavy perfumes of Dr. Rappaccini's shrubs had lured 
it from afar. Without alighting on the flowers, this winged 
brightness seemed to be attracted by Beatrice, and lingered in 
the air and fluttered about her head. Now, here it could not be 
but that Giovanni Guasconti's eyes deceived him. Be that as it 
might, he fancied that, while Beatrice was gazing at the insect 



RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER 281 

with childish delight, it grew faint and fell at her feet; its bright 
wings shivered ; it was dead — from no cause that he could 
discern, unless it were the atmosphere of her breath. Again 
Beatrice crossed herself and sighed heavily as she bent over 
the dead insect. 

An impulsive movement of Giovanni drew her eyes to the 
window. There she beheld the beautiful head of the young man 
— rather a Grecian than an Italian head, with fair, regular 
features, and a glistening of gold among his ringlets — gazing 
down upon her like a being that hovered in mid air. Scarcely 
knowing what he did, Giovanni threw down the bouquet which 
he had hitherto held in his hand. 

"Signora," said he, "there are pure and healthful flowers. 
Wear them for the sake of Giovanni Guasconti." 

"Thanks, signor," replied Beatrice, with her rich voice, that 
came forth as it were like a gush of music, and with a mirthful 
expression half childish and half woman-like. "I accept your 
gift, and would fain recompense it with this precious purple 
flower; but if I toss it into the air it will not reach you. So 
Signor Guasconti must even content himself with my thanks." 

She lifted the bouquet from the ground, and then, as if in- 
wardly ashamed at having stepped aside from her maidenly 
reserve to respond to a stranger's greeting, passed swiftly home- 
ward through the garden. But few as the moments were, it 
seemed to Giovanni, when she was on the point of vanishing 
beneath the sculptured portal, that his beautiful bouquet was 
already beginning to wither in her grasp. It was an idle 
thought; there could be no possibility of distinguishing a 
faded flower from a fresh one at so great a distance. 

For many days after this incident the young man avoided 
the window that looked into Dr. Rappaccini's garden, as if 
something ugly and monstrous would have blasted his eyesight 
had he been betrayed into a glance. He felt conscious of 
having put himself, to a certain extent, within the influence of 
an unintelligible power by the communication which he had 
opened with Beatrice. The wisest course would have been, if 
his heart were in any real danger, to quit his lodgings and 
Padua itself at once ; the next wiser, to have accustomed him- 
self, as far as possible, to the familiar and daylight view of 
Beatrice — thus bringing her rigidly and systematically 



282 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

within the limits of ordinary experience. Least of all, while 
avoiding her sight, ought Giovanni to have remained so near 
this extraordinary being that the proximity and possibility 
even of intercourse should give a kind of substance and reality 
to the wild vagaries which his imagination ran riot continually 
in producing. Guasconti had not a deep heart — or, at all 
events, its depths were not sounded now; but he had a quick 
fancy, and an ardent southern temperament, which rose every 
instant to a higher fever pitch. Whether or no Beatrice 
possessed those terrible attributes, that fatal breath, the affin- 
ity with those so beautiful and deadly flowers which were 
indicated by what Giovanni had witnessed, she had at least in- 
stilled a fierce and subtle poison into his system. It was not 
love, although her rich beauty was a madness to him; nor 
horror, even while he fancied her spirit to be imbued with the 
same baneful essence that seemed to pervade her physical 
frame; but a wild offspring of both love and horror that had 
each parent in it, and burned like one and shivered like the 
other. Giovanni knew not what to dread; still less did he know 
what to hope; yet hope and dread kept a continual warfare in 
his breast, alternately vanquishing one another and starting 
up afresh to renew the contest. Blessed are all simple emotions, 
be they dark or bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the 
two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal 
regions. 

Sometimes he endeavored to assuage the fever of his spirit 
by a rapid walk through the streets of Padua or beyond its 
gates: his footsteps kept time with the throbbings of his brain, 
so that the walk was apt to accelerate itself to a race. One 
day he found himself arrested; his arm was seized by a portly 
personage, who had turned back on recognizing the young 
man and expended much breath in overtaking him. 

" Signor Giovanni ! Stay, my young friend ! " cried he. " Have 
you forgotten me? That might well be the case if I were as 
much altered as yourself." 

It was Baglioni, whom Giovanni had avoided ever since their 
first meeting, from a doubt that the professor's sagacity would 
look too deeply into his secrets. Endeavoring to recover him- 
self, he stared forth wildly from his inner world into the outer 
one and spoke like a man in a dream. 



RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER 283 

"Yes; I am Giovanni Guasconti. You are Professor Pietro 
Baglioni. Now let me pass!" 

"Not yet, not yet, Signor Giovanni Guasconti," said the 
professor, smiling, but at the same time scrutinizing the youth 
with an earnest glance. "What! did I grow up side by side 
with your father? and shall his son pass me like a stranger in 
these old streets of Padua? Stand still, Signor Giovanni; for 
we must have a word or two before we part." 

"Speedily, then, most worshipful professor, speedily," said 
Giovanni, with feverish impatience. "Does not your worship 
see that I am in haste?" 

Now, while he was speaking there came a man in black 
along the street, stooping and moving feebly like a person in 
inferior health. His face was all overspread with a most sickly 
and sallow hue, but yet so pervaded with an expression of 
piercing and active intellect that an observer might easily 
have overlooked the merely physical attributes and have seen 
only this wonderful energy. As he passed, this person ex- 
changed a cold and distant salutation with Baglioni, but fixed 
his eyes upon Giovanni with an intentness that seemed to 
bring out whatever was within him worthy of notice. Never- 
theless, there was a peculiar quietness in the look, as if taking 
merely a speculative, not a human, interest in the young man. 

"It is Dr. Rappaccini!" whispered the professor when the 
stranger had passed. "Has he ever seen your face before?" 

"Not that I know/' answered Giovanni, starting at the 
name. 

"He has seen you! he must have seen you!" said Baglioni, 
hastily. "For some purpose or other, this man of science is 
making a study of you. I know that look of his ! It is the same 
that coldly illuminates his face as he bends over a bird, a mouse, 
or a butterfly, which, in pursuance of some experiment, he has 
killed by the perfume of a flower; a look as deep as Nature 
itself, but without Nature's warmth of love. Signor Giovanni, 
I will stake my life upon it, you are the subject of one of 
Rappaccini's experiments ! " 

"Will you make a fool of me?" cried Giovanni passionately. 
"That, signor professor, were an untoward experiment." 

"Patience! patience!" replied the imperturbable professor. 
"I tell thee, my poor Giovanni, that Rappaccini has a scientific 



284 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

interest in thee. Thou hast fallen into fearful hands ! And 
the Signora Beatrice, — what part does she act in this mys- 
tery?" 

But Guasconti, finding Baglioni's pertinacity intolerable, 
here broke away, and was gone before the professor could again 
seize his arm. He looked after the young man intently and 
shook his head. 

" This must not be," said Baglioni to himself. " The youth is 
the son of my old friend, and shall not come to any harm from 
which the arcana of medical science can preserve him. Besides, 
it is too insufferable an impertinence in Rappaccini, thus to 
snatch the lad out of my own hands, as I may say, and make 
use of him for his infernal experiments. This daughter of his! 
It shall be looked to. Perchance, most learned Rappaccini, I 
may foil you where you little dream of it!" 

Meanwhile Giovanni had pursued a circuitous route, and at 
length found himself at the door of his lodgings. As he crossed 
the threshold he was met by old Lisabetta, who smirked and 
smiled, and was evidently desirous to attract his attention; 
vainly, however, as the ebullition of his feelings had momen- 
tarily subsided into a cold and dull vacuity. He turned his eyes 
full upon the withered face that was puckering itself into a smile, 
but seemed to behold it not. The old dame, therefore, laid her 
grasp upon his cloak. 

"Signor! signor!" whispered she, still with a smile over the 
whole breadth of her visage, so that it looked not unlike a 
grotesque carving in wood, darkened by centuries. "Listen, 
signor! There is a private entrance into the garden!" 

"What do you say?" exclaimed Giovanni, turning quickly 
about, as if an inanimate thing should start into feverish life. 
"A private entrance into Dr. Rappaccini's garden?" 

"Hush! hush! not so loud!" whispered Lisabetta, putting 
her hand over his mouth. "Yes; into the worshipful doctor's 
garden, where you may see all his fine shrubbery. Many a 
young man in Padua would give gold to be admitted among 
those flowers." 

Giovanni put a piece of gold into her hand. 

"Show me the way," said he. 

A surmise, probably excited by his conversation with Baglioni, 
crossed his mind, that this interposition of old Lisabetta might 



RAPPACCINFS DAUGHTER 285 

perchance be connected with the intrigue, whatever were its 
nature, in which the professor seemed to suppose that Dr. 
Rappaccini was involving him. But such a suspicion, though it 
disturbed Giovanni, was inadequate to restrain him. The in- 
stant that he was aware of the possibility of approaching 
Beatrice, it seemed an absolute necessity of his existence to do 
so. It mattered not whether she were angel or demon; he was 
irrevocably within her sphere, and must obey the law that 
whirled him onward, in ever-lessening circles, towards a result 
which he did not attempt to foreshadow; and yet, strange to 
say, there came across him a sudden doubt whether this intense 
interest on his part were not delusory; whether it were really 
of so deep and positive a nature as to justify him in now thrust- 
ing himself into an incalculable position; whether it were not 
merely the fantasy of a young man's brain, only slightly or not 
at all connected with his heart. 

He paused, hesitated, turned half about, but again went on. 
His withered guide led him along several obscure passages, and 
finally undid a door, through which, as it was opened, there 
came the sight and sound of rustling leaves, with the broken 
sunshine glimmering among them. Giovanni stepped forth, 
and, forcing himself through the entanglement of a shrub that 
wreathed its tendrils over the hidden entrance, stood beneath 
his own window in the open area of Dr. Rappaccini's garden. 

How often is it the case that, when impossibilities have come 
to pass and dreams have condensed their misty substance into 
tangible realities, we find ourselves calm, and even coldly self- 
possessed, amid circumstances which it would have been a 
delirium of joy or agony to anticipate ! Fate delights to thwart 
us thus. Passion will choose his own time to rush upon the 
scene, and lingers sluggishly behind when an appropriate 
adjustment of events would seem to summon his appearance. 
So was it now with Giovanni. Day after day his pulses had 
throbbed with feverish blood at the improbable idea of an 
interview with Beatrice, and of standing with her, face to face, 
in this very garden, basking in the Oriental sunshine of her 
beauty, and snatching from her full gaze the mystery which he 
deemed the riddle of his own existence. But now there was a 
singular and untimely equanimity within his breast. He threw 
a glance around the garden to discover if Beatrice or her father 



286 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

were present, and, perceiving that he was alone, began a critical 
observation of the plants. 

The aspect of one and all of them dissatisfied him ; their gor- 
geousness seemed fierce, passionate, and even unnatural. There 
was hardly an individual shrub which a wanderer, straying by 
himself through a forest, would not have been startled to find 
growing wild, as if an unearthly face had glared at him out of 
the thicket. Several also would have shocked a delicate in- 
stinct by an appearance of artificialness indicating that there 
had been such commixture, and, as it were, adultery, of various 
vegetable species, that the production was no longer of God's 
making, but the monstrous offspring of man's depraved fancy, 
glowing with only an evil mockery of beauty. They were prob- 
ably the result of experiment, which in one or two cases had 
succeeded in mingling plants individually lovely into a com- 
pound possessing the questionable and ominous character that 
distinguished the whole growth of the garden. In fine, Giovanni 
recognized but two or three plants in the collection, and those 
of a kind that he well knew to be poisonous. While busy with 
these contemplations he heard the rustling of a silken garment, 
and, turning, beheld Beatrice emerging from beneath the 
sculptured portal. 

Giovanni had not considered with himself what should be his 
deportment; whether he should apologize for his intrusion into 
the garden, or assume that he was there with the privity at 
least, if not by the desire, of Dr. Rappaccini or his daughter; 
but Beatrice's manner placed him at his ease, though leaving 
him still in doubt by what agency he had gained admittance. 
She came lightly along the path and met him near the broken 
fountain. There was surprise in her face, but brightened by a 
simple and kind expression of pleasure. 

"You are a connoisseur in flowers, signor," said Beatrice, 
with a smile, alluding to the bouquet which he had flung her 
from the window. "It is no marvel, therefore, if the sight of 
my father's rare collection has tempted you to take a nearer 
view. If he were here, he could tell you many strange and inter- 
esting facts as to the nature and habits of these shrubs; for he 
has spent a lifetime in such studies, and this garden is his 
world." 

"And yourself, lady," observed Giovanni, "if fame says 



RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER 287 

true, — you likewise are deeply skilled in the virtues indicated 
by these rich blossoms and these spicy perfumes. Would you 
deign to be my instructress, I should prove an apter scholar 
than if taught by Signor Rappaccini himself." 

"Are there such idle rumors?" asked Beatrice, with the 
music of a pleasant laugh. "Do people say that I am skilled in 
my father's science of plants? What a jest is there ! No ; though 
I have grown up among these flowers, I know no more of them 
than their hues and perfume; and sometimes methinks I would 
fain rid myself of even that small knowledge. There are many 
flowers here, and those not the least' brilliant, that shock and 
offend me when they meet my eye. But pray, signor, do not 
believe these stories about my science. Believe nothing of me 
save what you see with your own eyes." 

"And must I believe all that I have seen with my own eyes? " 
asked Giovanni, pointedly, while the recollection of former 
scenes made him shrink. "No, signora; you demand too little 
of me. Bid me believe nothing save what comes from your 
own lips." 

It would appear that Beatrice understood him. There came 
a deep flush to her cheek; but she looked full into Giovanni's 
eyes, and responded to his gaze of uneasy suspicion with a 
queenlike haughtiness. 

" I do so bid you, signor," she replied. " Forget whatever you 
may have fancied in regard to me. If true to the outward senses, 
still it maybe false in its essence; but the words of Beatrice 
Rappaccini's lips are true from the depths of the heart out- 
ward. Those you may believe." 

A fervor glowed in her whole aspect and beamed upon 
Giovanni's consciousness like the light of truth itself ; but while 
she spoke there was a fragrance in the atmosphere around her, 
rich and delightful, though evanescent, yet which the young 
man, from an indefinable reluctance, scarcely dared to draw 
into his lungs. It might be the odor of the flowers. Could it be 
Beatrice's breath which thus embalmed her words with a 
strange richness, as if by steeping them in her heart? A faint- 
ness passed like a shadow over Giovanni and flitted away; he 
seemed to gaze through the beautiful girl's eyes into her trans- 
parent soul, and felt no more doubt or fear. 

The tinge of passion that had colored Beatrice's manner 



288 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

vanished; she became gay, and appeared to derive a pure de- 
light from her communion with the youth not unlike what the 
maiden of a lonely island might have felt conversing with a 
voyager from the civilized world. Evidently her experience of 
life had been confined within the limits of that garden. She 
talked now about matters as simple as the daylight or summer 
clouds, and now asked questions in reference to the city, or 
Giovanni's distant home, his friends, his mother, and his sisters 
— questions indicating such seclusion, and such lack of famili- 
arity with modes and forms, that Giovanni responded as if to 
an infant. Her spirit gushed out before him like a fresh rill that 
was just catching its first glimpse of the sunlight and wondering 
at the reflections of earth and sky which were flung into its 
bosom. There came thoughts, too, from a deep source, and 
fantasies of a gemlike brilliancy, as if diamonds and rubies 
sparkled upward among the bubbles of the fountain. Ever and 
anon there gleamed across the young man's mind a sense of 
wonder that he should be walking side by side with the being 
who had so wrought upon his imagination, whom he had ideal- 
ized in such hues of terror, in whom he had positively witnessed 
such manifestations of dreadful attributes, — that he should 
be conversing with Beatrice like a brother, and should find her 
so human and so maidenlike. But such reflections were only 
momentary; the effect of her character was too real not to make 
itself familiar at once. 

In this free intercourse they had strayed through the garden, 
and now, after many turns among its avenues, were come to the 
shattered fountain, beside which grew the magnificent shrub, 
with its treasury of glowing blossoms. A fragrance was diffused 
from it which Giovanni recognized as identical with that which 
he had attributed to Beatrice's breath, but incomparably 
more powerful. As her eyes fell upon it, Giovanni beheld her 
press her hand to her bosom as if her heart were throbbing 
suddenly and painfully. 

"For the first time in my life," murmured she, addressing 
the shrub, "I had forgotten thee." 

"I remember, signora," said Giovanni, "that you once 
promised to reward me with one of these living gems for the 
bouquet which I had the happy boldness to fling to your feet. 
Permit me now to pluck it as a memorial of this interview." 



RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER 289 

He made a step towards the shrub with extended hand ; but 
Beatrice darted forward, uttering a shriek that went through 
his heart like a dagger. She caught his hand and drew it back 
with the whole force of her slender figure. Giovanni felt her 
touch thrilling through his fibres. 

"Touch it not!" exclaimed she, in a voice of agony. "Not 
for thy life! It is fatal!" 

Then, hiding her face, she fled from him and vanished be- 
neath the sculptured portal. As Giovanni followed her with 
his eyes, he beheld the emaciated figure and pale intelligence 
of Dr. Rappaccini, who had been watching the scene, he knew 
not how long, within the shadow of the entrance. 

No sooner was Guasconti alone in his chamber than the 
image of Beatrice came back to his passionate musings, invested 
with all the witchery that had been gathering around it ever 
since his first glimpse of her, and now likewise imbued with a 
tender warmth of girlish womanhood. She was human; her 
nature was endowed with all gentle and feminine qualities; 
she was worthiest to be worshipped; she was capable, surely, 
on her part, of the height and heroism of love. Those tokens 
which he had hitherto considered as proofs of a frightful 
peculiarity in her physical and moral system were now either 
forgotten, or, by the subtle sophistry of passion transmitted 
into a golden crown of enchantment, rendering Beatrice the 
more admirable by so much as she was the more unique. What- 
ever had looked ugly was now beautiful; or, if incapable of 
such a change, it stole away and hid itself among those shape- 
less half ideas which throng the dim region beyond the daylight 
of our perfect consciousness. Thus did he spend the night, nor 
fell asleep until the dawn had begun to awake the slumbering 
flowers in Dr. Rappaccini's garden, whither Giovanni's dreams 
doubtless led him. Up rose the sun in his due season, and, 
flinging his beams upon the young man's eyelids, awoke him to 
a sense of pain. When thoroughly aroused, he became sensible 
of a burning and tingling agony in his hand — in his right hand 
— the very hand which Beatrice had grasped in her own when 
he was on the point of plucking one of the gemlike flowers. 
On the back of that hand there was now a purple print like that 
of four small fingers, and the likeness of a slender thumb upon 
his wrist. 



2 9 o NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

Oh, how stubbornly does love, — or even that cunning sem- 
blance of love which flourishes in the imagination, but strikes 
no depth of root into the heart, — how stubbornly does it hold 
its faith until the moment comes when it is doomed to vanish 
into thin mist! Giovanni wrapped a handkerchief about his 
hand and wondered what evil thing had stung him, and soon 
forgot his pain in a reverie of Beatrice. 

After the first interview, a second was in the inevitable 
course of what we call fate. A third; a fourth; and a meeting 
with Beatrice in the garden was no longer an incident in 
Giovanni's daily life, but the whole space in which he might 
be said to live; for the anticipation and memory of that ecstatic 
hour made up the remainder. Nor was it otherwise with the 
daughter of Rappaccini. She watched for the youth's appear- 
ance, and flew to his side with confidence as unreserved as if 
they had been playmates from early infancy — as if they were 
such playmates still. If, by any unwonted chance, he failed to 
come at the appointed moment, she stood beneath the window 
and sent up the rich sweetness of her tones to float around him 
in his chamber and echo and reverberate throughout his heart : 
" Giovanni 1 Giovanni! Why tarriest thou? Come down!" 
And down he hastened into that Eden of poisonous flowers. 

But, with all this intimate familiarity, there was still a 
reserve in Beatrice's demeanor, so rigidly and invariably sus- 
tained that the idea of infringing it scarcely occurred to his 
imagination. By all appreciable signs, they loved; they had 
looked love with eyes that conveyed the holy secret from the 
depths of one soul into the depths of the other, as if it were too 
sacred to be whispered by the way; they had even spoken love 
in those gushes of passion when their spirits darted forth in 
articulated breath like tongues of long-hidden flame; and yet 
there had been no seal of lips, no clasp of hands, nor any slight- 
est caress such as love claims and hallows. He had never 
touched one of the gleaming ringlets of her hair; her garment 
— so marked was the physical barrier between them — had 
never been waved against him by a breeze. On the few occa- 
sions when Giovanni had seemed tempted to overstep the limit, 
Beatrice grew so sad, so stern, and withal wore such a look of 
desolate separation, shuddering at itself, that not a spoken 
word was requisite to repel him. At such times he was startled 



RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER 291 

at the horrible suspicions that rose, monster-like, out of the 
caverns of his heart and stared him in the face; his love grew 
thin and faint as the morning mist; his doubts alone had sub- 
stance. But, when Beatrice's face brightened again after the 
momentary shadow, she was transformed at once from the 
mysterious, questionable being whom he had watched with so 
much awe and horror; she was now the beautiful and unsophis- 
ticated girl whom he felt that his spirit knew with a certainty 
beyond all other knowledge. 

A considerable time had now passed since Giovanni's last 
meeting with Baglioni. One morning, however, he was dis- 
agreeably surprised by a visit from the professor, whom he had 
scarcely thought of for whole weeks, and would willingly have 
forgotten still longer. Given up as he had long been to a per- 
vading excitement, he could tolerate no companions except 
upon condition of their perfect sympathy with his present 
state of feeling. Such sympathy was not to be expected from 
Professor Baglioni. 

The visitor chatted carelessly for a few moments about the 
gossip of the city and the university, and then took up another 
topic. 

"I have been reading an old classic author lately," said he, 
"and met with a story that strangely interested me. Possibly 
you may remember it. It is of an Indian prince, who sent a 
beautiful woman as a present to Alexander the Great. She 
was as lovely as the dawn and gorgeous as the sunset ; but what 
especially distinguished her was a certain rich perfume in her 
breath — richer than a garden of Persian roses. Alexander, as 
was natural to a youthful conqueror, fell in love at first sight 
with this magnificent stranger; but a certain sage physician, 
happening to be present, discovered a terrible secret in regard 
to her." 

"And what was that?" asked Giovanni, turning his eyes 
downward to avoid those of the professor. 

"That this lovely woman," continued Baglioni, with em- 
phasis, "had been nourished with poisons from her birth up- 
ward, until her whole nature was so imbued with them that 
she herself had become the deadliest poison in existence. 
Poison was her element of life. With that rich perfume of 
her breath she blasted the very air. Her love would have 



292 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

been poison — her embrace death. Is not this a marvellous 
tale?" 

"A childish fable," answered Giovanni, nervously starting 
from his chair. "I marvel how your worship finds time to read 
such nonsense among your graver studies." 

"By the by," said the professor, looking uneasily about him, 
"what singular fragrance is this in your apartment? Is it the 
perfume of your gloves? It is faint, but delicious; and yet, 
after all, by no means agreeable. Were I to breathe it long, 
methinks it would make me ill. It is like the breath of a 
flower; but I see no flowers in the chamber." 

"Nor are there any," replied Giovanni, who had turned pale 
as the professor spoke; "nor, I think, is there any fragrance 
except in your worship's imagination. Odors, being a sort of 
element combined of the sensual and the spiritual, are apt to 
deceive us in this manner. The recollection of a perfume, the 
bare idea of it, may easily be mistaken for a present reality." 

"Ay; but my sober imagination does not often play such 
tricks," said Baglioni; "and, were I to fancy any kind of odor, 
it would be that of some vile apothecary drug, wherewith my 
fingers are likely enough to be imbued. Our worshipful friend 
Rappaccini, as I have heard, tinctures his medicaments with 
odors richer than those of Araby. Doubtless, likewise, the fair 
and learned Signora Beatrice would minister to her patients 
with draughts as sweet as a maiden's breath; but woe to him 
that sips them!" 

Giovanni's face evinced many contending emotions. The 
tone in. which the professor alluded to the pure and lovely 
daughter, of Rappaccini was a torture to his soul; and yet the 
intimation of a view of her character, opposite to his own, gave 
instantaneous distinctness to a thousand dim suspicions, which 
now grinned at him like so many demons. But he strove hard 
to quell them and to respond to Baglioni with a true lover's 
perfect faith. 

"Signor professor," said he, "you were my father's friend; 
perchance, too, it is your purpose to act a friendly part towards 
his son. I would fain feel nothing towards you save respect 
and deference; but I pray you to observe, signor, that there 
is one subject on which we must not speak. You know not 
the Signora Beatrice. You cannot, therefore, estimate the 



RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER 293 

wrong — the blasphemy, I may even say — that is offered to 
her character by a light or injurious word." 

" Giovanni! my poor Giovanni!" answered the professor, 
with a calm expression of pity, "I know this wretched girl far 
better than yourself. You shall hear the truth in respect to the 
poisoner Rappaccini and his poisonous daughter; yes, poison- 
ous as she is beautiful. Listen ; for, even should you do violence 
to my gray hairs, it shall not silence me. That old fable of the 
Indian woman has become a truth by the deep and deadly 
science of Rappaccini and in the person of the lovely Beatrice." 

Giovanni groaned and hid his face. 

"Her father," continued Baglioni, "was not restrained by 
natural affection from offering up his child in this horrible man- 
ner as the victim of his insane zeal for science; for, let us do 
him justice, he is as true a man of science as ever distilled his 
own heart in an alembic. What, then, will be your fate? Be- 
yond a doubt you are selected as the material of some new 
experiment. Perhaps the result is to be death; perhaps a fate 
more awful still. Rappaccini, with what he calls the interest 
of science before his eyes, will hesitate at nothing." 

"It is a dream," muttered Giovanni to himself; "surely it is 
a dream." 

"But," resumed the professor, "be of good cheer, son of my 
friend. It is not yet too late for the rescue. Possibly we may 
even, succeed in bringing back . this miserable child within the 
limits of ordinary nature, from which her father's madness has 
estranged her. Behold this little silver vase! It was wrought 
by the hands of the renowned Benvenuto Cellini, and is well 
worthy to be a love gift to the fairest dame in Italy. But its 
contents are invaluable. One little sip of this antidote would 
have rendered the most virulent poisons of the Borgias innocu- 
ous. Doubt not that it will be as efficacious against those of 
Rappaccini. Bestow the vase, and the precious liquid within 
it, on your Beatrice, and hopefully await the result." 

Baglioni laid a small, exquisitely wrought silver vial on the 
table and withdrew, leaving what he had said to produce its 
effect upon the young man's mind. 

"We will thwart Rappaccini yet," thought he, chuckling to 
himself, as he descended the stairs; "but, let us confess the 
truth of him, he is a wonderful man — a wonderful man 



294 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

indeed ; a vile empiric, however, in his practice, and therefore 
not to be tolerated by those who respect the good old rules of 
the medical profession." 

Throughout Giovanni's whole acquaintance with Beatrice, 
he had occasionally, as we have said, been haunted by dark 
surmises as to her character; yet so thoroughly had she made 
herself felt by him as a simple, natural, most affectionate, and 
guileless creature, that the image now held up by Professor 
Baglioni looked as strange and incredible as if it were not in 
accordance with his own original conception. True, there were 
ugly recollections connected with his first glimpses of the 
beautiful girl; he could not quite forget the bouquet that with- 
ered in her grasp, and the insect that perished amid the sunny 
air, by no ostensible agency save the fragrance of her breath. 
These incidents, however, dissolving in the pure light of her 
character, had no longer the efficacy of facts, but were acknowl- 
edged as mistaken fantasies, by whatever testimony of the 
senses they might appear to be substantiated. There is some- 
thing truer and more real than what we can see with the eyes 
and touch with the finger. On such better evidence had 
Giovanni founded his confidence in Beatrice, though rather by 
the necessary force of her high attributes than by any deep and 
generous faith on his part. But now his spirit was incapable of 
sustaining itself at the height to which the early enthusiasm of 
passion had exalted it; he fell down, grovelling among earthly 
doubts, and defiled therewith the pure whiteness of Beatrice's 
image. Not that he gave her up; he did but distrust. He re- 
solved to institute some decisive test that should satisfy him, 
once for all, whether there were those dreadful peculiarities in 
her physical nature which could not be supposed to exist with- 
out some corresponding monstrosity of soul. His eyes, gazing 
down afar, might have deceived him as to the lizard, the insect, 
and the flowers; but if he could witness, at the distance of a 
few paces, the sudden blight of one fresh and healthful flower 
in Beatrice's hand, there would be room for no further question. 
With this idea he hastened to the florist's and purchased a 
bouquet that was still gemmed with the morning dew-drops. 

It was now the customary hour of his daily interview with 
Beatrice. Before descending into the garden, Giovanni failed 
not to look at his figure in the mirror, — a vanity to be 



RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER 295 

expected in a beautiful young man, yet, as displaying itself 
at that troubled and feverish moment, the token of a certain 
shallowness of feeling and insincerity of character. He did 
gaze, however, and said to himself that his features had never 
before possessed so rich a grace, nor his eyes such vivacity, 
nor his cheeks so warm a hue of superabundant life. 

"At least," thought he, "her poison has not yet insinuated 
itself into my system. I am no flower to perish in her grasp." 

With that thought he turned his eyes on the bouquet, which 
he had never once laid aside from his hand. A thrill of indefin- 
able horror shot through his frame on perceiving that those 
dewy flowers were already beginning to droop; they wore the 
aspect of things that had been fresh and lovely yesterday. 
Giovanni grew white as marble, and stood motionless before 
the mirror, staring at his own reflection there as at the likeness 
of something frightful. He remembered Baglioni's remark 
about the fragrance that seemed to pervade the chamber. It 
must have been the poison in his breath ! Then he shuddered 
— shuddered at himself. Recovering from his stupor, he began 
to watch with curious eye a spider that was busily at work 
hanging its web from the antique cornice of the apartment, 
crossing and recrossing the artful system of interwoven lines — 
as vigorous and active a spider as ever dangled from an old 
ceiling. Giovanni bent towards the insect, and emitted a deep, 
long breath. The spider suddenly ceased its toil; the web 
vibrated with a tremor originating in the body of the small 
artisan. Again Giovanni sent forth a breath, deeper, longer, 
and imbued with a venomous feeling out of his heart : he knew 
not whether he were wicked, or only desperate. The spider 
made a convulsive gripe with his limbs and hung dead across 
the window. 

"Accursed! accursed!" muttered Giovanni, addressing him- 
self. "Hast thou grown so poisonous that this deadly insect 
perishes by thy breath?" 

At that moment a rich, sweet voice came floating up from 
the garden. 

"Giovanni! Giovanni! It is past the hour! Why tarriest 
thou? Comedown!" 

"Yes," muttered Giovanni again. "She is the only being 
whom my breath may not slay! Would that it might!" 



296 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

He rushed down, and in an instant was standing before the 
bright and loving eyes of Beatrice. A moment ago his wrath 
and despair had been so fierce that he could have desired 
nothing so much as to wither her by a glance; but with her 
actual presence there came influences which had too real an 
existence to be at once shaken off : recollections of the delicate 
and benign power of her feminine nature, which had so often 
enveloped him in a religious calm ; recollections of many a holy 
and passionate outgush of her heart, when the pure fountain 
had been unsealed from its depths and made visible in its 
transparency to his mental eye; recollections which, had 
Giovanni known how to estimate them, would have assured 
him that all this ugly mystery was but an earthly illusion, and 
that, whatever mist of evil might seem to have gathered over 
her, the real Beatrice was a heavenly angel. Incapable as he 
was of such high faith, still her presence had not utterly lost its 
magic. Giovanni's rage was quelled into an aspect of sullen 
insensibility. Beatrice, with a quick spiritual sense, immedi- 
ately felt that there was a gulf of blackness between them 
which neither he nor she could pass. They walked on together, 
sad and silent, and came thus to the marble fountain and to its 
pool of water on the ground, in the midst of which grew the 
shrub that bore gem-like blossoms. Giovanni was affrighted 
at the eager enjoyment — the appetite, as it were — with 
which he found himself inhaling the fragrance of the flowers. 

"Beatrice," asked he, abruptly, "whence came this shrub?" 

"My father created it," answered she, with simplicity. 

"Created it! created it!" repeated Giovanni. "What mean 
you, Beatrice?" 

"He is a man fearfully acquainted with the secrets of 
Nature," replied Beatrice; "and, at the hour when I first drew 
breath, this plant sprang from the soil, the offspring of his 
science, of his intellect, while I was but his earthly child. 
Approach it not!" continued she, observing with terror that 
Giovanni was drawing nearer to the shrub. "It has qualities 
that you little dream of. But I, dearest Giovanni, — I grew up 
and blossomed with the plant and was nourished with its 
breath. It was my sister, and I loved it with a human affection ; 
for, alas ! — hast thou not suspected it? — there was an awful 
doom." 



RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER 297 

Here Giovanni frowned so darkly upon her that Beatrice 
paused and trembled. But her faith in his tenderness reassured 
her, and made her blush that she had doubted for an instant. 

"There was an awful doom," she continued, "the effect of 
my father's fatal love of science, which estranged me from all 
society of my kind. Until Heaven sent thee, dearest Giovanni, 
oh, how lonely was thy poor Beatrice!" 

"Was it a hard doom? " asked Giovanni, fixing his eyes upon 
her. 

"Only of late have I known how hard it was," answered she, 
tenderly. "Oh, yes; but my heart was torpid, and therefore 
quiet." 

Giovanni's rage broke forth from his sullen gloom like a 
lightning flash out of a dark cloud. 

"Accursed one!" cried he, with venomous scorn and anger. 
"And, finding thy solitude wearisome, thou hast severed me 
likewise from all the warmth of life and enticed me into thy 
region of unspeakable horror!" 

"Giovanni!" exclaimed Beatrice, turning her large bright 
eyes upon his face. The force of his words had not found its 
way into her mind ; she was merely thunderstruck. 

"Yes, poisonous thing!" repeated Giovanni, beside himself 
with passion. "Thou hast done it! Thou hast blasted me! 
Thou has filled my veins with poison! Thou hast made me as 
hateful, as ugly, as loathsome and deadly a creature as thyself 
— a world's wonder of hideous monstrosity! Now, if our breath 
be happily as fatal to ourselves as to all others, let us join our 
lips in one kiss of unutterable hatred, and so die!" 

"What has befallen me?" murmured Beatrice, with a low 
moan out of her heart. "Holy Virgin, pity me, a poor heart- 
broken child!" 

"Thou, — dost thou pray?" cried Giovanni, still with the 
same fiendish scorn. "Thy very prayers, as they come from 
thy lips, taint the atmosphere with death. Yes, yes; let us pray ! 
Let us to church and dip our fingers in the holy water at the 
portal ! They that come after us will perish as by a pestilence ! 
Let us sign crosses in the air ! It will be scattering curses abroad 
in the likeness of holy symbols!" 

"Giovanni," said Beatrice, calmly, for her grief was beyond 
passion, "why dost thou join thyself with me thus in those 



298 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

terrible words? I, it is true, am the horrible thing thou namest 
me. But thou, — what hast thou to do, save with one other 
shudder at my hideous misery to go forth out of the garden 
and mingle with thy race, and forget that there ever crawled 
on earth such a monster as poor Beatrice?" 

"Dost thou pretend ignorance?" asked Giovanni, scowling 
upon her. "Behold! this power have I gained from the pure 
daughter of Rappaccini." 

There was a swarm of summer insects flitting through the 
air in search of the food promised by the flower odors of the 
fatal garden. They circled round Giovanni's head, and were 
evidently attracted towards him by the same influence which 
had drawn them for an instant within the sphere of several of 
the shrubs. He sent forth a breath among them, and smiled 
bitterly at Beatrice as at least a score of the insects fell dead 
upon the ground. 

"I see it! I see it!" shrieked Beatrice. "It is my father's 
fatal science! No, no, Giovanni; it was not I! Never! never! 
I dreamed only to love thee and be with thee a little time, and 
so to let thee pass away, leaving but thine image in mine heart; 
for, Giovanni, believe it, though my body be nourished with 
poison, my spirit is God's creature, and craves love as its daily 
food. But my father, — he has united us in this fearful sym- 
pathy. Yes; spurn me, tread upon me, kill me! Oh, what is 
death after such words as thine? But it was not I. Not for a 
world of bliss would I have done it." 

Giovanni's passion had exhausted itself in its outburst from 
his lips. There now came across him a sense, mournful, and not 
without tenderness, of the intimate and peculiar relationship 
between Beatrice and himself. They stood, as it were, in an 
utter solitude, which would be made none the less solitary by 
the densest throng of human life. Ought not, then, the desert 
of humanity around them to press this insulated pair closer 
together? If they should be cruel to one another, who was 
there to be kind to them? Besides, thought Giovanni, might 
there not still" be a hope of his returning within the limits of 
ordinary nature, and leading Beatrice, the redeemed Beatrice, 
by the hand? O, weak, and selfish, and unworthy spirit, that 
could dream of an earthly union and earthly happiness as pos- 
sible, after such deep love had been so bitterly wronged as was 



RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER 299 

Beatrice's love by Giovanni's blighting words! No, no; there 
could be no such hope. She must pass heavily, with that 
broken heart, across the borders of Time — she must bathe her 
hurts in some fount of paradise, and forget her grief in the light 
of immortality, and there be well. 

But Giovanni did not know it. 

"Dear Beatrice," said he, approaching her, while she shrank 
away as always at his approach, but now with a different im- 
pulse, "dearest Beatrice, our fate is not yet so desperate. 
Behold! there is a medicine, potent, as a wise physician has 
assured me, and almost divine in its efficacy. It is composed of 
ingredients the most opposite to those by which thy awful 
father has brought this calamity upon thee and me. It is dis- 
tilled of blessed herbs. Shall we not quaff it together, and thus 
be purified from evil?" 

"Give it me!" said Beatrice, extending her hand to receive 
the little silver vial which Giovanni took from his bosom. She 
added, with a peculiar emphasis, "I will drink; but do thou 
await the result." 

She put Baglioni's antidote to her lips; and, at the same mo- 
ment, the figure of Rappaccini emerged from the portal and 
came slowly towards the marble fountain. As he drew near, 
the pale man of science seemed to gaze with a triumphant ex- 
pression at the beautiful youth and maiden, as might an artist 
who should spend his life in achieving a picture or a group of 
statuary and finally be satisfied with his success. He paused; 
his bent form grew erect with conscious power; he spread out 
his hands over them in the attitude of a father imploring a 
blessing upon his children; but those were the same hands that 
had thrown poison into the stream of their lives. Giovanni 
trembled. Beatrice shuddered nervously, and pressed her 
hand upon her heart. 

"My daughter," said Rappaccini, " thou art no longer lonely 
in the world. Pluck one of those precious gems from thy sister 
shrub and bid thy bridegroom wear it in his bosom. It will not 
harm him now. My science and the sympathy between thee 
and him have so wrought within his system that he now stands 
apart from common men, as thou dost, daughter of my pride 
and triumph, from ordinary women. Pass on, then, through the 
world, most dear to one another and dreadful to all besides!" 



300 , NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

"My father," said Beatrice, feebly, — and still as she spoke 
she kept her hand upon her heart, — "wherefore didst thou 
inflict this miserable doom upon thy child? " 

"Miserable!" exclaimed Rappaccini. "What mean you, 
foolish girl? Dost thou deem it misery to be endowed with 
marvellous gifts against which no power nor strength could 
avail an enemy — misery, to be able to quell the mightiest 
with a breath — misery, to be as terrible as thou art beautiful? 
Wouldst thou, then, have preferred the condition of a weak 
woman, exposed to all evil and capable of none? " 

"I would fain have been loved, not feared," murmured 
Beatrice, sinking down upon the ground. "But now it matters 
not. I am going, father, where the evil which thou hast striven 
to mingle with my being will pass away like a dream — like the 
fragrance of these poisonous flowers, which will no longer taint 
my breath among the flowers of Eden. Farewell, Giovanni! 
Thy words of hatred are like lead within my heart; but they, 
too, will fall away as I ascend. Oh, was there not, from the 
first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?" 

To Beatrice, — so radically had her earthly part been 
wrought upon by Rappaccini's skill, — as poison had been life, 
so the powerful antidote was death; and thus the poor victim 
of man's ingenuity and of thwarted nature, and of the fatality 
that attends all such efforts of perverted wisdom, perished 
there, at the feet of her father and Giovanni. Just at that mo- 
ment Professor Pietro Baglioni looked forth from the window, 
and called loudly, in a tone of triumph mixed with horror, to 
the thunderstricken man of science, — 

"Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is this the upshot of your 
experiment!" 






RALPH WALDO EMERSON 
NATURE x 



To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his 
chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and 
write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, 
let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heav- 
enly worlds will separate between him and what he touches. 
One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with 
this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual 
presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great 
they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand 
years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for 
many generations the remembrance of the city of God which 
had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of 
beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile. 

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always 
present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a 
kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. 
Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the 
wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding 
out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise 
spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the 
wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the 
simplicity of his childhood. 

When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct 
but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of 
impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which 

1 Nature, chapters I (without title) and vi ("Idealism"). When (in 1834) 
Emerson came to settle in Concord, he lived, for some time, with his step- 
grandfather, Dr. Ezra Ripley, in the Old Manse. Here, in the same room in 
which Hawthorne wrote later, he worked on his first book, — "little azure-colored 
Nature" which was published anonymously in September, 1836. The opening 
sentences in Emerson's "Introduction" reveal clearly the purpose of the book: 
"Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biog- 
raphies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and na- 
ture face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an 
original relation to the universe? . . . The sun shines to-day also." 



3 o2 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the 
tree of the poet. The charming landscape which I saw this 
morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty 
farms. Miller owns this field, Locke, that, and Manning the 
woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. 
There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he 
whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is 
the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty- 
deeds give no title. 

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most per- 
sons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial 
seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines 
into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is 
he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to 
each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the 
era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth be- 
comes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild 
delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature 
says, — he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent 
griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer 
alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; 
for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a 
different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest 
midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or 
a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredi- 
ble virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow-puddles, at twi- 
light, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any 
occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect 
exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods, too, 
a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what 
period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpet- 
ual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and 
sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest 
sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In 
the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that 
nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity 
(leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing 
on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and 
uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I 
become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the cur- 



NATURE 303 

rents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or 
particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then 
foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, — 
master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the 
lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, 
I find something more dear and connate than in streets or vil- 
lages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant 
line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his 
own nature. 

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is 
the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vege- 
table. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, 
and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new 
to me, and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. 
Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion 
coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing 
right. 

Yet it is certain that the power to produce this 'delight does 
not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is 
necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, 
nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same 
scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for 
the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy to-day. 
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man labor- 
ing under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. 
Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him 
who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand 
as it shuts down over less worth in the population. 

IDEALISM x 

Thus is the unspeakable but intelligible and practicable 
meaning of the world conveyed to man, the immortal pupil, in 
every object of sense. To this one end of Discipline, all parts 
of nature conspire. 

1 Nature, chapter VI. The uses of nature, according to Emerson, may be classi- 
fied under four heads: Commodity, Beauty, Language, and Discipline. The last 
of these "includes the preceding uses, as parts of itself." "Space, time, society, 
labor, climate, food, locomotion, the animals, the mechanical forces, give us sin- 
cerest lessons, day by day, whose meaning is unlimited. They educate both the 
Understanding and the Reason." (Chapter v, "Discipline.") 



3 o4 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

A noble doubt perpetually suggests itself, whether this end 
be not the Final Cause of the Universe; and whether nature 
outwardly exists. It is a sufficient account of that Appearance 
we call the World, that God will teach a human mind, and so 
makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent sensa- 
tions, which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and 
trade. In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the 
report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they 
make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference 
does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god 
paints the image in the firmament of the soul? The relations of 
parts and the end of the whole remaining the same, what is 
the difference, whether land and sea interact, and worlds re- 
volve and intermingle without number or end, — deep yawn- 
ing under deep, and galaxy balancing galaxy, throughout 
absolute space, — or, whether, without relations of time and 
space, the same appearances are inscribed in the constant faith 
of man? Whether nature enjoy a substantial existence without, 
or is only in the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful and 
alike Venerable to me. Be it what it may, it is ideal to me, so 
long as I cannot try the accuracy of my senses. 

The frivolous make themselves merry with the Ideal theory, 
as if its consequences were burlesque; as if it affected the stabil- 
ity of nature. It surely does not. God never jests with us, and 
will not compromise the end of nature, by permitting any in- 
consequence in its procession. Any distrust of the permanence 
of laws would paralyze the faculties of man. Their permanence 
is sacredly respected, and his faith therein is perfect. The 
wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the 
permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship to be tossed, 
but like a house to stand. It is a natural consequence of this 
structure, that, so long as the active powers predominate over 
the reflective, we resist with indignation any hint that nature 
is more short-lived or mutable than spirit. The broker, the 
wheelwright, the carpenter, the toll-man, are much displeased 
at the intimation. 

But whilst we acquiesce entirely in the permanence of nat- 
ural laws, the question of the absolute existence of nature still 
remains open. It is the uniform effect of culture on the human 
mind, not to shake our faith in the stability of particular 



NATURE 305 

phenomena, as of heat, water, azote; but to lead us to regard 
nature as a phenomenon, not a substance; to attribute neces- 
sary existence to spirit; to esteem nature as an accident and an 
effect. 

To the senses and the unrenewed understanding belongs a 
sort of instinctive belief in the absolute existence of nature. 
In their view, man and nature are indissolubly joined. Things 
are ultimates, and they never look beyond their sphere. The 
presence of Reason mars this faith. The first effort of thought 
tends to relax this despotism of the senses, which binds us to 
nature as if we were a part of it, and shows us nature aloof, 
and, as it were, afloat. Until this higher agency intervenes, the 
animal eye sees, with wonderful accuracy, sharp outlines and 
colored surfaces. When the eye of Reason opens, to outline and 
surface are at once added grace and expression. These proceed 
from imagination and affection, and abate somewhat of the 
angular distinctness of objects. If the Reason be stimulated to 
more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces become transparent, 
and are no longer seen; causes and spirits are seen through them. 
The best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of the 
higher powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before 
its God. 

Let us proceed to indicate the effects of culture. 1. Our first 
institution in the Ideal philosophy is a hint from Nature her- 
self. 

Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. 
Certain mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local 
position apprises us of a dualism. We are strangely affected by 
seeing the shore from a moving ship, from a balloon, or through 
the tints of an unusual sky. The least change in our point of 
view gives the whole world a pictorial air. A man who seldom 
rides needs only to get into a coach and traverse his own town, 
to turn the street into a puppet-show. The men, the women, 
— talking, running, bartering, fighting, — the earnest me- 
chanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs, are unreal- 
ized at once, or at least wholly detached from all relation to 
the observer, and seen as apparent, not substantial beings. 
What new thoughts are suggested by seeing a face of country 
quite familiar, in the rapid movement of the railroad car! Nay, 
the most wonted objects (make a very slight change in the 



3 o6 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

point of vision) please us most. In a camera-obscura, the 
butcher's cart and the figure of one of our own family amuse 
us. So a portrait of a well-known face gratifies us. Turn the 
eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your 
legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it 
any time these twenty years ! 

In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the differ- 
ence between the observer and the spectacle, between man and 
nature. Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a 
low degree of the sublime is felt from the fact, probably, that 
man is hereby apprised, that, whilst the world is a spectacle, 
something in himself is stable. 

2. In a higher manner, the poet communicates the same 
pleasure. By a few strokes he delineates, as on air, the sun, the 
mountain, the camp, the city, the hero, the maiden, not differ- 
ent from what we know them, but only lifted from the ground 
and afloat before the eye. He unfixes the land and the sea, 
makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought, 
and disposes them anew. Possessed himself by a heroic passion, 
he uses matter as symbols of it. The sensual man conforms 
thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts. 
The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; the other, as fluid, 
and impresses his being thereon. To him, the refractory world 
is ductile and flexible; he invests dust and stones with humanity, 
and makes them the words of the Reason. The imagination 
may be defined to be, the use which the Reason makes of the 
material world. Shakespeare possesses the power of subordinat- 
ing nature for the purposes of expression, beyond all poets. His 
imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to- 
hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that is 
uppermost in his mind. The remotest spaces of nature are 
visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together, 
by a subtle spiritual connection. We are made aware that mag- 
nitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and 
expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus, in his sonnets, 
the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, he finds to be 
the shadow of his beloved; time, which keeps her from him, is 
his chest; the suspicion she has awakened is her ornament; 

"The ornament of beauty is Suspect, 
A crow which flies in heaven's sweetest air." 



NATURE 307 

His passion is not the fruit of chance; it swells, as he speaks, to 
a city, or a state. 

"No, it was builded far from accident; 
It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls 
Under the brow of thralling discontent ; 
It fears not policy, that heretic, 
That works on leases of short numbered hours, 
But all alone stands hugely politic." 

In the strength of his constancy, the Pyramids seem to him 
recent and transitory. The freshness of youth and love dazzles 
him with its resemblance to morning. 

"Take those lips away 
Which so sweetly were forsworn; 
And those eyes, — the break of day, 
Lights that do mislead the morn." 

The wild beauty of this hyperbole, I may say, in passing, it 
would not be easy to match in literature. 

This transfiguration which all material objects undergo 
through the passion of the poet, — this power which he exerts 
to dwarf the great, to magnify the small, — might be illustrated 
by a thousand examples from his plays. I have before me the 
Tempest, and will cite only these few lines. 

"Ariel. The strong based promontory 
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up 
The pine and cedar." 

Prospero calls for music to soothe the frantic Alonzo, and his 
companions; 

"A solemn air, and the best comforter 
To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains 
Now useless, boiled within thy skull." 



Again: 



"The charm dissolves apace, 
And, as the morning steals upon the night, 
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses 
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle 
Their clearer reason. 

Their understanding 
Begins to swell: and the approaching tide 
Will shortly fill the reasonable shores 
That now lie foul and muddy." 



3 o8 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

The perception of real affinities between events (that is to 
say, of ideal affinities, for those only are real) enables the poet 
thus to make free with the most imposing forms and phenomena 
of the world, and to assert the predominance of the soul. 

3. Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own 
thoughts, he differs from the philosopher only herein, that the 
one proposes Beauty as his main end; the other, Truth. But 
the philosopher, not less than the poet, postpones the apparent 
order and relations of things to the empire of thought. "The 
problem of philosophy," according to Plato, "is, for all that 
exists conditionally, to find a ground unconditioned and abso- 
lute." It proceeds on the faith that a law determines, all 
phenomena, which being known, the phenomena can be pre- 
dicted. That law, when in the mind, is an idea. Its beauty is 
infinite. The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a 
beauty which is truth, and a truth which is beauty, is the aim of 
both. Is not the charm of one of Plato's or Aristotle's defini- 
tions strictly like that of the Antigone of Sophocles? It is, in 
both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; 
that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervaded and 
dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has pene- 
trated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and 
recognized itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In 
physics, when this is attained, the memory disburdens itself 
of its cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries 
of observation in a single formula. 

Thus even in physics, the material is degraded before the 
spiritual. The astronomer, the geometer, rely on their irrefrag- 
able analysis, and disdain the results of observation. The sub- 
lime remark of Euler on his law of arches, "This will be found 
contrary to all experience, yet is true," had already transferred 
nature into the mind, and left matter like an outcast corpse. 

4. Intellectual science has been observed to beget invariably 
a doubt of the existence of matter. Turgot said, "He that has 
never doubted the existence of matter may be assured he has 
no aptitude for metaphysical inquiries." It fastens the atten- 
tion upon immortal necessary uncreated natures, that is, upon 
Ideas; and in their presence, we feel that the outward circum- 
stance is a dream and a shade. Whilst we wait in this Olympus 
of gods, we think of nature as an appendix to the soul. We 



NATURE 



309 



ascend into their region, and know that these are the thoughts 
of the Supreme Being. ''These are they who were set up from 
everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When 
he prepared the heavens, they were there ; when he established 
the clouds above, when he strengthened the fountains of the 
deep. Then they were by him, as one brought up with him. Of 
them took he counsel." 

Their influence is proportionate. As objects of science, they 
are accessible to few men. Yet all men are capable of being 
raised by piety or by passion into their region. And no man 
touches these divine natures, without becoming, in some degree, 
himself divine. Like a new soul, they renew the body. We be- 
come physically nimble and lightsome; we tread on air; life is 
no longer irksome, and we think it will never be so. No man 
fears age or misfortune or death, in their serene company, for 
he is transported out of the district of change. Whilst we be- 
hold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the 
difference between the absolute and the conditional or relative. 
We apprehend the absolute. As it were, for the first time, we 
exist. We become immortal, for we learn that time and space 
are relations of matter; that, with a perception of truth, or a 
virtuous will, they have no affinity. 

5. Finally, religion and ethics — which may be fitly called 
the practice of ideas, or the introduction of ideas into life — 
have an analogous effect with all lower culture, in degrading 
nature and suggesting its dependence on spirit. Ethics and 
religion differ herein; that the one is the system of human 
duties commencing from man; the other, from God. Religion 
includes the personality of God; Ethics does not. They are one 
to our present design. They both put nature under foot. The 
first and last lesson of religion is, "The things that are seen, are 
temporal; the things that are unseen, are eternal." It puts an 
affront upon nature. It does that for the unschooled, which 
philosophy does for Berkeley and Viasa. The uniform language 
that may be heard in the churches of the most ignorant sects is, 
" Contemn the unsubstantial shows of the world; they are vani- 
ties, dreams, shadows, unrealities; seek the realities of religion." 
The devotee flouts nature. Some theosophists have arrived at a 
certain hostility and indignation towards matter, as the Mani- 
chean and Plotinus. They distrusted in themselves any look- 



3 io RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

ing back to these flesh-pots of Egypt. 1 Plotinus was ashamed of 
his body. In short, they might all say of matter, what Michel 
Angelo said of external beauty, "It is the frail and weary weed, 
in which God dresses the soul, which he has called into time." 

It appears that motion, poetry, physical and intellectual 
science, and religion, all tend to affect our convictions of the 
reality of the external world. But I own there is something 
ungrateful in expanding too curiously the particulars of the 
general proposition, that all culture tends to imbue us with 
idealism. I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. 
I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons. Let 
us speak her fair. I do not wish to fling stones at my beautiful 
mother, nor soil my gentle nest. I only wish to indicate the true 
position of nature in regard to man, wherein to establish man, 
all right education tends; as the ground which to attain is the 
object of human life, that is, of man's connection with nature. 
Culture inverts the vulgar views of nature, and brings the mind 
to call that apparent, which it uses to call real, and that real, 
which it uses to call visionary. Children, it is true, believe in 
the external world. The belief that it appears only, is an after- 
thought, but with culture, this faith will as surely arise on the 
mind as did the first. 

The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith is 
this, that it presents the world in precisely that view which is 
most desirable to the mind. It is, in fact, the view which Rea- 
son, both speculative and practical, that is, philosophy and 
virtue, take. For, seen in the light of thought, the world always 
is phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. Ideal- 
ism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of per- 
sons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, 
not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, 
in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God 
paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul. 
Therefore the soul holds itself off from a too trivial and micro- 
scopic study of the universal tablet. It respects the end too 
much, to immerse itself in the means. It sees something more 
important in Christianity than the scandals of ecclesiastical 
history, or the niceties of criticism; and, very incurious con- 
cerning persons or miracles, and not at all disturbed by chasms 
1 See p. 32, note. 



;THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 311 

of historical evidence, it accepts from God the phenomenon, as 
it finds it, as the pure and awful form of religion in the world. 
It is not hot and passionate at the appearance of what it calls 
its own good or bad fortune, at the union or opposition of other 
persons. No man is its enemy. It accepts whatsoever befalls, 
as part of its lesson. It is a watcher more than a doer, and it is 
a doer, only that it may the better watch. 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR l 

Mr. President and Gentlemen: 

I greet you on the recommencement of our literary year. 
Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of 
labor. We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the 
recitation of histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient 
Greeks ; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours ; 
nor for the advancement of science, like our contemporaries in 
the British and European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has 
been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters 
amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such, 
it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps 
the time is already come, when it ought to be, and will be, some- 
thing else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will 
look from under its iron lids, and fill the postponed expectation 
of the world with something better than the exertions of me- 
chanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship 

1 An oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, 
August 31, 1837; now printed in the volume entitled Nature, Addresses, and 
Lectures. "This grand oration," wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes (Ralph Waldo 
Emerson, p. 88), "was our intellectual Declaration of Independence. Nothing 
like it had been heard in the halls of Harvard since Samuel Adams supported 
the affirmative of the question, 'Whether it be lawful to resist the chief magis- 
trate, if the commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved.' It was easy to find 
fault with an expression here and there. The dignity, not to say the formality, 
of an Academic assembly was startled by the realism that looked for the infinite 
in 'the meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan.' They could understand the deep 
thoughts suggested by ' the meanest flower that blows,' but these domestic illus- 
trations had a kind of nursery homeliness about them which the grave professors 
and sedate clergymen were unused to expect on so stately an occasion. But the 
young men went out from it as if a prophet had been proclaiming to them 'Thus 
saith the Lord.' No listener ever forgot that address, and among all the notable 
utterances of the speaker it may be questioned if one ever contained more truth 
in language more like that of immediate inspiration." See also Lowell's comment 
on the occasion, p. 518 of the present volume. 



3 i2 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, 
that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on 
the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions, arise, 
that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt, 
that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the 
constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astrono- 
mers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand 
years? 

In this hope, I accept the topic which not only usage, but 
the nature of our association, seem to prescribe to this day, — 
the American Scholar. Year by year, we come up hither to 
read one more chapter of his biography. Let us inquire what 
light new days and events have thrown on his character, and 
his hopes. 

It is one of those fables, which, out of an unknown antiquity, 
convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the begin- 
ning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to 
himself ; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to 
answer its end. 

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that 
there is One Man, — present to all particular men only par- 
tially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole 
society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a pro- 
fessor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, 
and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or 
social state, these functions are parcelled out to individuals, 
each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each 
other performs his! The fable implies, that the individual, to 
possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to 
embrace all the other laborers. But unfortunately, this original 
unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multi- 
tudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that 
it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of 
society is one in which the members have suffered amputation 
from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, — 
a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man. 

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. 
The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, 
is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. 
He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 313 

into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman 
scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by 
the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The 
priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book; the me- 
chanic, a machine, the sailor, a rope of a ship. 

In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated 
intellect. In the right state, he is Man Thinking. In the degen- 
erate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a 
mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking. 

In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the theory of his office 
is contained. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, all her mon- 
itory pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites. 
Is not, indeed, every man a student, and do not all things exist 
for the student's behoof? And, finally, is not the true scholar 
the only true master? But the old oracle said: "All things have 
two handles: beware of the wrong one." In life, too often, the 
scholar errs with mankind and forfeits his privilege. Let us see 
him in his school, and consider him in reference to the main 
influences he receives. 

I. The first in time and the first in importance of the influ- 
ences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun ; and, 
after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever 
the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, be- 
holding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this 
spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. 
What is nature to him? There is never a beginning, there is 
never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, 
but always circular power returning into itself. Therein it re- 
sembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never 
can find, — so entire, so boundless. Far, too, as her splendors 
shine, system on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, 
without centre, without circumference, — in the mass and in 
the particle, nature hastens to render account of herself to the 
mind. Classification begins. To the young mind, everything is 
individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two 
things, and see in them one nature; then three, then three 
thousand ; and so tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, 
it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discov- 
ering roots running under ground, whereby contrary and remote 



3 i4 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

things cohere, and flower out from one stem. It presently 
learns, that, since the dawn of history, there has been a con- 
stant accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classi- 
fication but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, 
and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the 
human mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure 
abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary 
motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method 
throughout matter; and science is nothing but the finding of 
analogy, identity in the most remote parts. The ambitious soul 
sits down before each refractory fact; one after another, re- 
duces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to their class 
and their law, and goes on forever to animate the last fibre of 
organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight. 

Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of 
day, is suggested, that he and it proceed from one root; one is 
leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. 
And what is that Root? Is not that the soul of his soul? — A 
thought too bold, — a dream too wild. Yet when this spiritual 
light shall have revealed the law of more earthly natures, — 
when he has learned to worship the soul, and to see that the 
natural philosophy that now is, is only the first gropings of its 
gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever-expanding 
knowledge as to a becoming creator. He shall see that nature 
is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is 
seal, and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. 
Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to 
him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he 
is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. 
And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the 
modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim. 

II. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar is, 
the mind of the Past, — in whatever form, whether of litera- 
ture, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are 
the best type of the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall 
get at the truth, — learn the amount of this influence more 
conveniently, — by considering their value alone. 

The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age 
received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 315 

the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. 
It came into him, life; it went out from him, truth. It came to 
him, short-lived actions; it went out from him, immortal 
thoughts. It came to him, business; it went from him, poetry. 
It was dead fact; now, it is quick 1 thought. It can stand, and it 
can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely 
in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so 
high does it soar, so long does it sing. 

Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, 
of transmitting life into truth. In proportion to the complete- 
ness of the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness 
of the product be. But none is quite perfect. As no air-pump 
can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any 
artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perish- 
able from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall 
be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to con- 
temporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, 
must write its own books; or, rather, each generation for the 
next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this. 

Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which 
attaches to the act of creation — the act of thought — is trans- 
ferred to the record. The poet chanting, was felt to be a divine 
man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a 
just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled, the book is 
perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. 
Instantly, the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. 
The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to 
open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, 
having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an 
outcry, if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are 
written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of 
talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted 
dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young 
men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the 
views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, 
forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men 
in libraries, when they wrote these books. 

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the book-worm. 
Hence, the book-learned class, who value books as such; not as 

1 Living. 



3 i6 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

related to nature and the human constitution, but as making 
a sort of Third Estate l with the world and the soul. Hence, 
the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of 
all degrees. 

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the 
worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all 
means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had 
better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction 
clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a 
system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. 
This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within 
him, although, in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet un- 
born. The soul active sees absolute truth ; and utters truth, or 
creates. In this action it is genius; not the privilege of here and 
there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its 
essence, it is progressive. The book, the college, the school of 
art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance 
of genius. This is good, say they, — let us hold by this. They 
pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But 
genius looks forward; the eyes of man are set in his forehead, 
not in his hindhead; man hopes; genius creates. Whatever 
talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the 
Deity is not his; cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet 
flame. There are creative manners, there are creative actions 
and creative words; manners, actions, words, that is, indicative 
of no custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the 
mind's own sense of good and fair. 

On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it receive 
from another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of light, 
without periods of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a 
fatal disservice is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy 
of genius by over-influence. The literature of every nation bears 
me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakespearized 
now for two hundred years. 

Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly 
subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his 
instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he 
can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in 
other men's transcripts of their readings. But when the inter- 

1 The three estates were the nobility, the clergy, and the common people. 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 317 

vals of darkness come, as come they must, — when the sun is 
hid, and the stars withdraw their shining, — we repair to the 
lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to 
the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we may 
speak. The Arabian proverb says, "A fig-tree, looking on a 
fig-tree, becometh fruitful." 

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from 
the best books. They impress us with the conviction, that one 
nature wrote, and the same reads. We read the verses of one of 
the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, 
with the most modern joy, — with a pleasure, I mean, which 
is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their 
verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, 
when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three 
hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, 
that which I also had wellnigh thought and said. But for the 
evidence thence afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the 
identity of all minds, we should suppose some preestablished 
harmony, some foresight of souls that were to be, and some 
preparation of stores for their future wants, like the fact ob- 
served in insects, who lay up food before death for the young 
grub they shall never see. 

I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exag- 
geration of instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know, that, 
as the human body can be nourished on any food, though it 
were boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind 
can be fed by any knowledge. And great and heroic men have 
existed, who had almost no other information than by the 
printed page. I only would say, that it needs a strong head to 
bear that diet. One must be an inventor to read well. As the 
proverb says, "He that would bring home the wealth of the 
Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies." There is then 
creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is 
braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we 
read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sen- 
tence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as 
broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that, as 
the seer's hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days 
and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his 
volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, 



3 i8 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

only that least part, — only the authentic utterances of the 
oracle; all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times 
Plato's and Shakespeare's. 

Of course, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable 
to a wise man. History and exact science he must learn by 
laborious reading. Colleges, in like manner, have their indis- 
pensable office, — to teach elements. But they can only highly 
serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they 
gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable 
halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their 
youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which 
apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary- 
foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail 
the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our 
American colleges will recede in their public importance, 
whilst they grow richer every year. 

III. There goes in the world a notion, that the scholar 
should be a recluse, a valetudinarian, — as unfit for any handi- 
work or public labor, as a penknife for an axe. The so-called 
"practical men" sneer at speculative men, as if, because they 
speculate or see, they could do nothing. I have heard it said 
tha.t the clergy — who are always, more universally than any 
other class, the scholars of their day — are addressed as 
women; that the rough, spontaneous conversation of men they 
do not hear, but only a mincing and diluted speech. They are 
often virtually disfranchised; and, indeed, there are advocates 
for their celibacy. As far as this is true of the studious classes, 
it is not just and wise. Action is with the scholar subordinate, 
but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, 
thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs 
before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its 
beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar 
without the heroic mind. The preamble of thought, the transi- 
tion through which it passes from the unconscious to the con- 
scious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. 
Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose 
not. 

The world — this shadow of the soul, or other me — lies wide 
around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 319 

and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this 
resounding tumult. I grasp the hands of those next me, and 
take my place in the ring to suffer and to work, taught by an 
instinct, that so shall the dumb abyss be vocal with speech. I 
pierce its order; I dissipate its fear; I dispose of it within the 
circuit of my expanding life. So much only of life as I know by 
experience, so much of the wilderness have I vanquished and 
planted, or so far have I extended my being, my dominion. I 
do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves 
and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is 
pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exas- 
peration, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The 
true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a 
loss of power. It is the raw material out of which the intellect 
moulds her splendid products. A strange process too, this, by 
which experience is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf 
is converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all 
hours. 

The actions and events of our childhood and youth are now 
matters of calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in 
the air. Not so with our recent actions, — with the business 
which we now have in hand. On this we are quite unable to 
speculate. Our affections as yet circulate through it. We no 
more feel or know it, than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the 
brain of our body. The new deed is yet a part of life, — remains 
for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In some contem- 
plative hour, it detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit, to 
become a thought of the mind. Instantly, it is raised, trans- 
figured; the corruptible has put on incorruption. Henceforth 
it is an object of beauty, however base its origin and neighbor- 
hood. Observe, too, the impossibility of antedating this act. 
In its grub state, it cannot fly, it cannot shine, it is a dull grub. 
But suddenly, without observation, the selfsame thing unfurls 
beautiful wings, and is an angel of wisdom. So is there no fact, 
no event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or 
later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring 
from our body into the empyrean. Cradle and infancy, school 
and play-ground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the 
love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that 
once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative, 



3 20 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

profession and party, town and country, nation and world, 
must also soar and sing. 

Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit 
actions has the richest return of wisdom. I will not shut myself 
out of this globe of action, and transplant an oak into a flower- 
pot, there to hunger and pine; nor trust the revenue of some 
single faculty, and exhaust one vein of thought, much like those 
Savoyards, who, getting their livelihood by carving shepherds, 
shepherdesses, and smoking Dutchmen, for all Europe, went 
out one day to the mountain to find stock, and discovered that 
they had whittled up the last of their pine-trees. Authors we 
have, in numbers, who have written out their vein, and who, 
moved by a commendable prudence, sail for Greece or Pales- 
tine, follow the trapper into the prairie, or ramble round 
Algiers, to replenish their merchantable stock. 

If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covet- 
ous of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in 
country labors ; in town, — in the insight into trades and manu- 
factures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in 
science; in art; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a 
language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. 
I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already 
lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life 
lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and cope- 
stones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn 
grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which 
the field and the work-yard made. 

But the final value of action, like that of books, and better 
than books, is, that it is a resource. That great principle of 
Undulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and 
expiring of the breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and 
flow of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold; and as yet 
more deeply ingrained in every atom and every fluid, is known 
to us under the name of Polarity, — these "fits of easy trans- 
mission and reflection," as Newton called them, are the law of 
nature because they are the law of spirit. 

The mind now thinks; now acts; and each fit reproduces 
the other. When the artist has exhausted his materials, when 
the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer ap- 
prehended, and books are a weariness, — he has always the 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 321 

resource to live. Character is higher than intellect. Thinking 
is the function. Living is the functionary. The stream retreats 
to its source. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as 
strong to think. Does he lack organ or medium to impart his 
truths? He can still fall back on this elemental force of living 
them. This is a total act. Thinking is a partial act. Let the 
grandeur of justice shine in his affairs. Let the beauty of affec- 
tion cheer his lowly roof. Those "far from fame," who dwell 
and act with him, will feel the force of his constitution in the 
doings and passages of the day better than it can be measured 
by any public and designed display. Time shall teach him that 
the scholar loses no hour which the man lives. Herein he un- 
folds the sacred germ of his instinct, screened from influence. 
What is lost in seemliness is gained in strength. Not out of 
those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their 
culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build 
the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible 
Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare. 

I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of 
the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is 
virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for 
unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always 
we are invited to work ; only be this limitation observed, that a 
man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opin- 
ion to the popular judgments and modes of action. 

I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, 
by books, and by action. It remains to say somewhat of his 
duties. 

They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be 
comprised in self-trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to 
raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appear- 
ances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of ob- 
servation. Flamsteed 1 and Herschel, in their glazed observa- 
tories, may catalogue the stars with the praise of all men, and, 
the results being splendid and useful, honor is sure. But he, in 
his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous 
stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of 
as such, — watching days and months, sometimes, for a few 
1 John Flamsteed (1646-17 19), an English astronomer. 



322 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

facts ; correcting still his old records, — must relinquish dis- 
play and immediate fame. In the long period of his prepara- 
tion, he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in 
popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder 
him aside. Long he must stammer in his speech; often forego 
the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept — how 
often ! — poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of 
treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, 
the religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, 
and, of course, the self -accusation, the faint heart, the frequent 
uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling 
vines in the way of the self -relying and self -directed; and the 
state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, 
and especially to educated society. For all this loss and scorn, 
what offset? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest 
functions of human nature. He is one who raises himself from 
private considerations, and breathes and lives on public and 
illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye. He is the world's 
heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades 
ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic 
sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the con- 
clusions of history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in 
all emergencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as its com- 
mentary on the world of actions, — these he shall receive and 
impart. And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her invio- 
lable seat pronounces on the passing men and events of to- 
day, — this he shall hear and promulgate. 

These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confi- 
dence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and 
he only knows the world. The world of any moment is the 
merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of a 
government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up 
by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all de- 
pended on this particular up or down. The odds are that the 
whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the 
scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not 
quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient 
and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. 
In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by 
himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 323 

patient of reproach; and bide his own time, — happy enough, 
if he can satisfy himself alone, that this day he has seen some- 
thing truly. Success treads on every right step. For the in- 
stinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he 
thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of 
his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. 
He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private 
thoughts is master to that extent of all men whose language he 
speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be trans- 
lated. The poet, in utter solitude remembering his spontane- 
ous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded 
that which men in crowded cities find true for them also. The 
orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, — 
his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, — until he 
finds that he is the complement of his hearers ; that they drink 
his words because he fulfils for them their own nature; the 
deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to 
his wonder he finds, this is the most acceptable, most public, 
and universally true. The people delight in it; the better part 
of every man feels, This is my music; this is myself. 

In self -trust all the virtues are comprehended. Free should 
the scholar be, — free and brave. Free even to the definition 
of freedom, "without any hindrance that does not arise out of 
his own constitution." Brave ; for fear is a thing which a scholar 
by his very function puts behind him. Fear always springs 
from ignorance. It is a shame to him if his tranquillity, amid 
dangerous times, arise from the presumption, that, like chil- 
dren and women, his is a protected class; or if he seek a tempo- 
rary peace by the diversion of his thoughts from politics or 
vexed questions, hiding his head like an ostrich in the flowering 
bushes, peeping into microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a 
boy whistles to keep his courage up. So is the danger a danger 
still; so is the fear worse. Manlike let him turn and face it. 
Let him look into its eye and search its nature, inspect its 
origin, — see the whelping of this lion, — which lies no great 
way back; he will then find in himself a perfect comprehension 
of its nature and extent ; he will have made his hands meet on 
the other side, and can henceforth defy it, and pass on superior. 
The world is his, who can see through its pretension. What 
deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you 



324 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

behold, is there only by sufferance, — by your sufferance. See 
it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow. 

Yes, we are the cowed, — we the trustless. It is a mischiev- 
ous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world 
was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid 
in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes 
as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt 
themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has 
anything in him divine, the firmament flows before him and 
takes his signet and form. Not he is great who can alter mat- 
ter, but he who can alter my state of mind. They are the kings 
of the world who give the color of their present thought to all 
nature and all art, and persuade men by the cheerful serenity 
of their carrying the matter, that this thing which they do, is 
the apple which the ages have desired to pluck, now at last ripe, 
and inviting nations to the harvest. The great man makes the 
great thing. Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of 
the table. 1 Linnaeus makes botany the most alluring of studies, 
and wins it from the farmer and the herb-woman; Davy, 
chemistry; and Cuvier, fossils. The day is always his, who 
works in it with serenity and great aims. The unstable esti- 
mates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, 
as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon. 

For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fath- 
omed, — darker than can be enlightened. I might not carry 
with me the feeling of my audience in stating my own belief. 
But I have already shown the ground of my hope, in adverting 
to the doctrine that man is one. I believe man has been 
wronged; he has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light, 
that can lead him back to his prerogatives. Men are become of 
no account. Men in history, men in the world of to-day, are 
bugs, are spawn, and are called "the mass" and "the herd." 
In a century, in a millennium, one or two men; that is to say, — 
one or two approximations to the right state of every man. All 
the rest behold in the hero or the poet their own green and crude 
being, — ripened; yes, and are content to be less, so that may 
attain to its full stature. What a testimony, — full of grandeur, 
full of pity, is borne to the demands of his own nature, by the 
poor clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices in the glory of 
1 A Scotch version of a notion familiar to readers of Don Quixote. 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 325 

his chief. The poor and the low find some amends to their im- 
mense moral capacity, for their acquiescence in a political and 
social inferiority. They are content to be brushed like flies from 
the path of a great person, so that justice shall be done by him to 
that common nature which it is the dearest desire of all to see 
enlarged and glorified. They sun themselves in the great man's 
light, and feel it to be their own element. They cast the dig- 
nity of man from their down-trod selves upon the shoulders of 
a hero, and will perish to add one drop of blood to make that 
great heart beat, those giant sinews combat and conquer. He 
lives for us, and we live in him. 

Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; 
and power because it is as good as money, — the "spoils," so 
called, " of office." And why not? for they aspire to the highest, 
and this, in their sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake 
them, and they shall quit the false good, and lead to the true, 
and leave governments to clerks and desks. This revolution is 
to be wrought by the gradual domestication of the idea of Cul- 
ture. The main enterprise of the world for splendor, for ex- 
tent, is the upbuilding of a man. Here are the materials strown 
along the ground. The private life of one man shall be a more 
illustrious monarchy, — more formidable to its enemy, more 
sweet and serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom 
in history. For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth the 
particular natures of all men. Each philosopher, each bard, 
each actor, has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one day 
I can do for myself. The books which once we valued more 
than the apple of the eye, we have quite exhausted. What is 
that but saying, that we have come up with the point of view 
which the universal mind took through the eyes of one scribe ; 
we have been that man, and have passed on. First, one; then, 
another; we drain all cisterns, and, waxing greater by all these 
supplies, we crave a better and more abundant food. The man 
has never lived that can feed us ever. The human mind cannot 
be enshrined in a person, who shall set a barrier on any one side 
to this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one central fire, 
which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the capes 
of Sicily; and, now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates 
the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams 
out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men. 



326 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction of 
the Scholar. I ought not to delay longer to add what I have to 
say, of nearer reference to the time and to this country. 

Historically, there is thought to be a difference in the ideas 
which predominate over successive epochs, and there are data 
for marking the genius of the Classic, of the Romantic, and 
now of the Reflective or Philosophical age. With the views I 
have intimated of the oneness or the identity of the mind 
through all individuals, I do not much dwell on these differ- 
ences. In fact, I believe each individual passes through all 
three. The boy is a Greek; the youth, romantic; the adult, re- 
flective. I deny not, however, that a revolution in the leading 
idea may be distinctly enough traced. 1 

Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that 
needs be evil? We, it seems, are critical; we are embarrassed 
with second thoughts; we cannot enjoy anything for hankering 
to know whereof the pleasure consists; we are lined with eyes; 
we see with our feet; the time is infected with Hamlet's unhap- 
piness, — 

"Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." 

Is it so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would 
we be blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, 
and drink truth dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary 
class, as a mere announcement of the fact, that they find them- 
selves not in the state of mind of their fathers, and regret the 
coming state as untried; as a boy dreads the water before he 
has learned that he can swim. If there is any period one would 
desire to be born in, — is it not the age of Revolution; when 
the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being com- 
pared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by 
hope ; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated 
by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all 
times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. 

I read with joy some of the auspicious signs of the coming 
days, as they glimmer already through poetry and art, through 
philosophy and science, through church and state. 

One of these signs is the fact, that the same movement which 
effected the elevation of what was called the lowest class in the 
state assumed in literature a very marked and as benign an 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 327 

aspect. Instead of the sublime and beautiful; the near, the low, 
the common, was explored and poetized. That, which had been 
negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing 
and provisioning themselves for long journeys into far coun- 
tries, is suddenly found to be richer than all foreign parts. The 
literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of 
the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the 
time. It is a great stride. It is a sign — is it not? — of new vigor, 
when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life 
run into the hands and the feet. I ask not for the great, the 
remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is 
Greek art, or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, 
I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me 
insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future 
worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal 
in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the 
news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of 
the body; — show me the ultimate reason of these matters; 
show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause 
lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities 
of nature ; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that 
ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, 
and the ledger, referred to the like cause by which light undu- 
lates and poets sing; and the world lies no longer a dull miscel- 
lany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no 
trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and animates 
the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench. 

This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith, Burns, Cow- 
per, and, in a newer time, of Goethe, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. 
This idea they have differently followed and with various suc- 
cess. In contrast with their writing, the style of Pope, of John- 
son, of Gibbon, looks cold and pedantic. This writing is blood- 
warm. Man is surprised to find that things near are not less 
beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near explains 
the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all 
nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in 
discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the 
moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the 
ancients. 

There is one man of genius, who has done much for this 



328 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

philosophy of life, whose literary value has never yet been 
rightly estimated; — I mean Emanuel Swedenborg. The most 
imaginative of men, yet writing with the precision of a mathe- 
matician, he endeavored to ingraft a purely philosophical 
Ethics on the popular Christianity of his time. Such an at- 
tempt, of course, must have difficulty, which no genius could 
surmount. But he saw and showed the connection between 
nature and the affections of the soul. He pierced the emblem- 
atic or spiritual character of the visible, audible, tangible 
world. Especially did his shade-loving muse hover over and 
interpret the lower parts of nature ; he showed the mysterious 
bond that allies moral evil to the foul material forms, and has 
given in epical parables a theory of insanity, of beasts, of un- 
clean and fearful things. 

Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous 
political movement, is the new importance given to the single 
person. Everything that tends to insulate the individual — to 
surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man 
shall feel the world as his, and man shall treat with man as a 
sovereign state with a sovereign state — tends to true union as 
well as greatness. "I learned," said the melancholy Pestalozzi, 
"that no man in God's wide earth is either willing or able to 
help any other man." Help must come from the bosom alone. 
The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the 
ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the 
hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges. 
If there be one lesson more than another, which should pierce 
his ear, it is: The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is 
the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of 
sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for 
you to know all, it is for you to dare all. Mr. President and 
Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man 
belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to 
the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly 
muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already 
suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private 
avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is 
decent, indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic conse- 
quence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low ob- 
jects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the deco- 



DIVINITY SCHOOL ADDRESS 329 

rous and the complaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, 
who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, 
shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not 
in unison with these, — but are hindered from action by the 
disgust which the principles on which business is managed 
inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, — some of them sui- 
cides. What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thou- 
sands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers of 
the career, do not yet see, that if the single man plant himself 
indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world 
will come round to him. Patience, — patience; — with the 
shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace, 
the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work, the 
study and the communication of principles, the making those 
instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is it not the 
chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit; — not to be 
reckoned one character; — not to yield that peculiar fruit 
which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the 
gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the sec- 
tion, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geograph- 
ically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and friends, 
— please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own 
feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own 
minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, 
for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and 
the love of man shall be a wall of defence and a wreath of joy 
around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because 
each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also 
inspires all men. 

DIVINITY SCHOOL ADDRESS * 

In this refulgent summer it has been a luxury to draw the 
breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is 
spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full 

1 An address delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, 
Sunday evening, July 15, 1838; now printed in the volume entitled Nature, 
Addresses, and Lectures. In his Journal, Emerson wrote, on March 14th: "I 
ought to sit and think, and then write a discourse to the American clergy, show- 
ing them the ugliness and unprofitableness of theology and churches at this day, 
and the glory and sweetness of the moral nature out of whose pale they are 



330 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of- 
Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart 
with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the 
stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a 
young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes 
the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the 
crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed 
more happily. The corn. and the wine have been freely dealt 
to all creatures, and the never-broken silence with which the 
old bounty goes forward has not yielded yet one word of expla- 
nation. One is constrained to respect the perfection of this 
world, in which our senses converse. How wide; how rich; 
what invitation from every property it gives to every faculty 
of man! In its fruitful soils; in its navigable sea; in its moun- 
tains of metal and stone; in its forests of all woods; in its ani- 
mals; in its chemical ingredients; in the powers and path of 
light, heat, attraction, and life, it is well worth the pith and 
heart of great men to subdue and enjoy it. The planters, the 
mechanics, the inventors, the astronomers, the builders of 
cities, and the captains, history delights to honor. 

But when the mind opens, and reveals the laws which trav- 
erse the universe, and make things what they are, then shrinks 
the great world at once into a mere illustration and fable of 
this mind. What am I? and What is? asks the human spirit 
with a curiosity new-kindled, but never to be quenched. Be- 
hold these outrunning laws, which our imperfect apprehension 
can see tend this way and that, but not come full circle. Be- 
hold these infinite relations, so like, so unlike; many, yet one. 

almost wholly shut." The Seniors in the Divinity School having invited him to 
make the Annual Address, Emerson spoke out, happy to have an opportunity to 
inspire these young men with "the glory and sweetness of the moral nature," 
and careless of the hostile reception he might expect at the hands of the clergy. 
The address did, indeed, cause "a profound sensation in religious circles, and led 
to a controversy," as Holmes says, "in which Emerson had little more than the 
part of Patroclus when the Greeks and Trojans fought over his body." The 
address, Holmes goes on to say, "is reverential, but it is also revolutionary. The 
file-leaders of Unitarianism drew back in dismay, and the ill names which had 
often been applied to them were now heard from their own lips as befitting this 
new heresy; if so mild a reproach as that of heresy belonged to this alarming 
manifesto. And yet, so changed is the whole aspect of the theological world since 
the time when that discourse was delivered that it is read as calmly to-day as a 
common 'election sermon,' if such are ever read at all." {Ralph Waldo Emerson, 
pp. 89-91.) 



DIVINITY SCHOOL ADDRESS 331 

I would study, I would know, I would admire forever. These 
works of thought have been the entertainments of the human 
spirit in all ages. 

A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to 
man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. 
Then he is instructed in what is above him. He learns that his 
being is without bound; that, to the good, to the perfect, he is 
born, low as he now lies in evil and weakness. That which he 
venerates is still his own, though he has not realized it yet. 
He ought. He knows the sense of that grand word, though his 
analysis fails entirely to render account of it. When in inno- 
cency, or when, by intellectual perception, he attains to say, — 
"I love the Right; Truth is beautiful within and without, for- 
evermore. Virtue, I am thine; save me: use me: thee will I 
serve, day and night, in great, in small, that I may be not vir- 
tuous, but virtue," — then is the end of the creation answered, 
and God is well pleased. 

The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the 
presence of certain divine laws. It perceives that this homely 
game of life we play covers, under what seem foolish details, 
principles that astonish. The child amidst his baubles is learn- 
ing the action of light, motion, gravity, muscular force ; and in 
the game of human life, love, fear, justice, appetite, man, and 
God, interact. These laws refuse to be adequately stated. 
They will not be written out on paper, or spoken by the tongue. 
They elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly 
in each other's faces, in each other's actions, in our own re- 
morse. The moral traits which are all globed into every virtu- 
ous act and thought, — in speech, we must sever, and de- 
scribe or suggest by painful enumeration of many particulars. 
Yet, as this sentiment is the essence of all religion, let me guide 
your eye to the precise objects of the sentiment, by an enumer- 
ation of some of those classes of facts in which this element is 
conspicuous. 

The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the 
perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute them- 
selves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to 
circumstance. Thus in the soul of man there is a justice whose 
retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed, 
is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed, is by the 



332 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby 
puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he 
God; the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty 
of God, do enter into that man with justice. If a man dis- 
semble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaint- 
ance with his own being. A man in the view of absolute good- 
ness, adores, with total humility. Every step so downward is a 
step upward. The man who renounces himself, comes to him- 
self. 

See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh everywhere, 
righting wrongs, correcting appearances, and bringing up facts 
to a harmony with thoughts. Its operation in life, though slow 
to the senses, is, at last, as sure as in the soul. By it, a man is 
made the Providence to himself, dispensing good to his good- 
ness, and evil to his sin. Character is always known. Thefts 
never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of 
stone walls. The least admixture of a lie — for example, the 
taint of vanity, the least attempt to make a good impression, 
a favorable appearance — will instantly vitiate the effect. 
But speak the truth, and all nature and all spirits help you with 
unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive 
or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass under- 
ground there do seem to stir and move to bear you witness. 
See again the perfection of the Law as it applies itself to the 
affections, and becomes the law of society. As we are, so we 
associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by 
affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into 
heaven, into hell. 

These facts have always suggested to man the sublime creed, 
that the world is not the product of manifold power, but of one 
will, of one mind; and that one mind is everywhere active, in 
each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the pool; and whatever 
opposes that will is everywhere balked and baffled, because 
things are made so, and not otherwise. Good is positive. Evil 
is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the 
privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. 
Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a 
man hath, so much life hath he. For all things proceed out of 
this same spirit, which is differently named love, justice, tem- 
perance, in its different applications, just as the ocean receives 



DIVINITY SCHOOL ADDRESS 333 

different names on the several shores which it washes. All 
things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire 
with it. Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole 
strength of nature. In so far as he roves from these ends, he 
bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries; his being shrinks out 
of all remote channels, he becomes less and less, a mote, a 
point, until absolute badness is absolute death. 

The perception of this law of laws awakens in the mind a 
sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which 
makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm 
and to command. It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of 
the world. It is myrrh and storax, and chlorine and rosemary. 
It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of 
the stars is it. By it, is the universe made safe and habitable, 
not by science or power. Thought may work cold and intransi- 
tive in things, and find no end or unity; but the dawn of the 
sentiment of virtue on the heart gives and is the assurance that 
Law is sovereign over all natures; and the worlds, time, space, 
eternity, do seem to break out into joy. 

This sentiment is divine and deifying. It is the beatitude of 
man. It makes him illimitable. Through it, the soul first knows 
itself. It corrects the capital mistake of the infant man, who 
seeks to be great by following the great, and hopes to derive 
advantages from another, — by showing the fountain of all 
good to be in himself, and that he, equally with every man, is 
an inlet into the deeps of Reason. When he says, "I ought"; 
when love warms him; when he chooses, warned from on high, 
the good and great deed; then, deep melodies wander through 
his soul from Supreme Wisdom. Then he can worship, and be 
enlarged by his worship; for he can never go behind this senti- 
ment. In the sublimest flights of the soul, rectitude is never 
surmounted, love is never outgrown. 

This sentiment lies at the foundation of society, and suc- 
cessively creates all forms of worship. The principle of venera- 
tion never dies out. Man fallen into superstition, into sensual- 
ity, is never quite without the visions of the moral sentiment. 
In like manner, all the expressions of this sentiment are sacred 
and permanent in proportion to their purity. The expressions 
of this sentiment affect us more than all other compositions. 
The sentences of the oldest time, which ejaculate this piety, 



334 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

are still fresh and fragrant. This thought dwelled always deep- 
est in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative East; 
not alone in Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, 
but in Egypt, in Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always 
owed to Oriental genius its divine impulses. What these holy 
bards said, all sane men found agreeable and true. And the 
unique impression of Jesus upon mankind, whose name is not 
so much written as ploughed into the history of this world, is 
proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion. 

Meantime, whilst the doors of the temple stand open, night 
and day, before every man, and the oracles of this truth cease 
never, it is guarded by one stern condition: this, namely; it is 
an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly 
speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can re- 
ceive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true 
in me, or wholly reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he 
who he may, I can accept nothing. On the contrary, the ab- 
sence of this primary faith is the presence of degradation. As 
is the flood so is the ebb. Let this faith depart, and the very 
words it spake, and the things it made, become false and hurt- 
ful. Then falls the church, the state, art, letters, life. The doc- 
trine of the divine nature being forgotten, a sickness infects 
and dwarfs the constitution. Once man was all; now he is an 
appendage, a nuisance. And because the indwelling Supreme 
Spirit cannot wholly be got rid of, the doctrine of it suffers this 
perversion, that the divine nature is attributed to one or two 
persons, and denied to all the rest, and denied with fury. The 
doctrine of inspiration is lost ; the base doctrine of the majority 
of voices usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul. Miracles, 
prophecy, poetry; the ideal life, the holy life, exist as ancient 
history merely; they are not in the belief, nor in the aspiration 
of society; but, when suggested, seem ridiculous. Life is comic 
or pitiful, as soon as the high ends of being fade out of sight, 
and man becomes near-sighted, and can only attend to what 
addresses the senses. 

These general views, which, whilst they are general, none 
will contest, find abundant illustration in the history of religion, 
and especially in the history of the Christian Church. In that, 
all of us have had our birth and nurture. The truth contained 
in that, you, my young friends, are now setting forth to teach. 



DIVINITY SCHOOL ADDRESS 335 

As the Cultus, or established worship of the civilized world, it 
has great historical interest for us. Of its blessed words, which 
have been the consolation of humanity, you need not that I 
should speak. I shall endeavor to discharge my duty to you, 
on this occasion, by pointing out two errors in its administra- 
tion, which daily appear more gross from the point of view we 
have just now taken. 

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw 
with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe 
harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his 
being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of 
man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that 
God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew 
to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sub- 
lime emotion, "I am divine. Through me, God acts; through 
me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when 
thou also thinkest as I now think." But what a distortion did 
his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and 
the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which 
will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understand- 
ing caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the 
next age, "This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will 
kill you, if you say he was a man." The idioms of his language, 
and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his 
truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his 
tropes. Christianity became a mythus, as the poetic teaching 
of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he 
felt that man's life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and 
he knew that his daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. 
But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, 
gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the 
blowing clover and the falling rain. 

He felt respect for Moses and the prophets; but no unfit ten- 
derness at postponing their initial revelations, to the hour and 
the man that now is; to the eternal revelation in the heart. 
Thus was he a true man. Having seen that the law in us is 
commanding, he would not suffer it to be commanded. Boldly, 
with hand, and heart, and life, he declared it was God. Thus is 
he, as I think, the only soul in history who has appreciated the 
worth of a man. 



336 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

i. In this point of view we become very sensible of the first 
defect of historical Christianity. Historical Christianity has 
fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate 
religion. As it appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, 
it is not the doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the per- 
sonal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells, with 
noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The soul knows 
no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of 
the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spon- 
taneous love. But by this eastern monarchy of a Christianity, 
which indolence and fear have built, the friend of man 1 is made 
the injurer of man. The manner in which his name is sur- 
rounded with expressions, which were once sallies of admira- 
tion and love, but are now petrified into official titles, kills all 
generous sympathy and liking. All who hear me feel that the 
language that describes Christ to Europe and America, is not 
the style of friendship and enthusiasm to a good and noble 
heart, but is appropriated and formal, — paints a demi-god 
as the Orientals or the Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo. 
Accept the injurious impositions of our early catechetical in- 
struction, and even honesty and self-denial were but splendid 
sins, if they did not wear the Christian name. One would 
rather be 

"A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn," 

than to be defrauded of his manly right in coming into nature, 
and finding not names and places, not land and professions, 
but even virtue and truth foreclosed and monopolized. You 
shall not be a man even. You shall not own the world; you 
shall not dare, and live after the infinite Law that is in you, 
and in company with the infinite Beauty which heaven and 
earth reflect to you in all lovely forms; but you must subordi- 
nate your nature to Christ's nature ; you must accept our inter- 
pretations ; and take his portrait as the vulgar draw it. 

That is always best which gives me to myself. The sublime 
is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself. 
That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows 
God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer 

1 Urged at least to write " friend of man " with a capital F, Emerson responded : 
"If I did so, they would all go to sleep." 



DIVINITY SCHOOL ADDRESS 337 

a necessary reason for my being. Already the long shadows 
of untimely oblivion creep over me, and I shall decease forever. 

The divine bards are the friends of my virtue, of my intel- 
lect, of my strength. They admonish me, that the gleams which 
flash across my mind are not mine, but God's; that they had 
the like, and were not disobedient to the heavenly vision. So I 
love them. Noble provocations go out from them, inviting me 
to resist evil; to subdue the world; and to Be. And thus by his 
holy thoughts, Jesus serves us, and thus only. To aim to con- 
vert a man by miracles, is a profanation of the soul. A true 
conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made, by 
the reception of beautiful sentiments. It is true that a great 
and rich soul, like this, falling among the simple, does so pre- 
ponderate, that, as his did, it names the world. The world 
seems to them to exist for him, and they have not yet drunk so 
deeply of his sense, as to see that only by coming again to 
themselves, or to God in themselves, can they grow forever- 
more. It is a low benefit to give me something; it is a high- 
benefit to enable me to do somewhat of myself. The time is 
coming when all men will see, that the gift of God to the soul is 
not a vaunting, overpowering, excluding sanctity, but a sweet, 
natural goodness, a goodness like thine and mine, and that so 
invites thine and mine to be and to grow. 

The injustice of the vulgar tone of preaching is not less fla- 
grant to Jesus, than to the souls which it profanes. The preach- 
ers do not see that they make his gospel not glad, and shear him 
of the locks of beauty and the attributes of heaven. When I see 
a majestic Epaminondas, or Washington; when I see among 
my contemporaries, a true orator, an upright judge, a dear 
friend ; when I vibrate to the melody and fancy of a poem ; I see 
beauty that is to be desired. And so lovely, and with yet more 
entire consent of my human being, sounds in my ear the severe 
music of the bards that have sung of the true God in all ages. 
Now do not degrade the life and dialogues of Christ out of the 
circle of this charm, by insulation and peculiarity. Let them 
lie as they befell, alive and warm, part of human life, and of 
the landscape, and of the cheerful day. 

2. The second defect of the traditionary and limited way of 
using the mind of Christ is a consequence of the first; this, 
namely, that the Moral Nature, that Law of laws, whose reve- 



338 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

lations introduce greatness, — yea, God himself, into the open 
soul, is not explored as the fountain of the established teaching 
in society. Men have come to speak of the revelation as some- 
what long ago given and done, as if God were dead. The injury 
to faith throttles the preacher; and the goodliest of institutions 
becomes an uncertain and inarticulate voice. 

It is very certain that it is the effect of conversation with the 
beauty of the soul, to beget a desire and need to impart to 
others the same knowledge and love. If utterance is denied, 
the thought lies like a burden on the man. Always the seer is a 
sayer. Somehow his dream is told: somehow he publishes it 
with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas; sometimes 
with chisel on stone; sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, 
his soul's worship is builded; sometimes in anthems or indefinite 
music; but clearest and most permanent, in words. 

The man enamored of this excellency, becomes its priest or 
poet. The office is coeval with the world. But observe the con- 
dition, the spiritual limitation of the office. The spirit only 
can teach. Not any profane man, not any sensual, not any liar, 
not any slave can teach, but only he can give, who has ; he only 
can create, who is. The man on whom the soul descends, 
through whom the soul speaks, alone can teach. Courage, piety, 
love, wisdom, can teach; and every man can open his door to 
these angels, and they shall bring him the gift of tongues. But 
the man who aims to speak as books enable, as synods use, as 
the fashion guides, and as interest commands, babbles. Let 
him hush. 

To this holy office you propose to devote yourselves. I wish 
you may feel your call in throbs of desire and hope. The office 
is the first in the world. It is of that reality that it cannot suffer 
the deduction of any falsehood. And it is my duty to say to 
you, that the need was never greater of new revelation than 
now. From the views I have already expressed, you will infer 
the sad conviction, which I share, I believe, with numbers, of 
the universal decay and now almost death of faith in society. 
The soul is not preached. The Church seems to totter to its 
fall, almost all life extinct. On this occasion, any complaisance 
would be criminal, which told you, whose hope and commission 
it is to preach the faith of Christ, that the faith of Christ is 
preached. 



DIVINITY SCHOOL ADDRESS 339 

It is time that this ill-suppressed murmur of all thoughtful 
men against the famine of our churches; this moaning of the 
heart because it is bereaved of the consolation, the hope, the 
grandeur, that come alone out of the culture of the moral na- 
ture ; should be heard through the sleep of indolence, and over 
the din of routine. This great and perpetual office of the 
preacher is not discharged. Preaching is the expression of the 
moral sentiment in application to the duties of life. In how 
many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made 
sensible that he is an infinite Soul ; that the earth and heavens 
are passing into his mind ; that he is drinking forever the soul of 
God? Where now sounds the persuasion, that by its very 
melody imparadises my heart, and so affirms its own origin in 
heaven? Where shall I hear words such as in elder ages drew 
men to leave all and follow, — father and mother, house and 
land, wife and child? Where shall I hear these august laws of 
moral being so pronounced, as to fill my ear, and I feel ennobled 
by the offer of my uttermost action and passion? The test of 
the true faith, certainly, should be its power to charm and com- 
mand the soul, as the laws of nature control the activity of the 
hands, — so commanding that we find pleasure and honor in 
obeying. The faith should blend with the light of rising and of 
setting suns, with the flying cloud, the singing bird, and the 
breath of flowers. But now the priest's Sabbath has lost the 
splendor of nature; it is unlovely; we are glad when it is done; 
we can make, we do make, even sitting in our pews, a far better, 
holier, sweeter, for ourselves. 

Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the 
worshipper defrauded and disconsolate. We shrink as soon as 
the prayers begin, which do not uplift, but smite and offend us. 
We are fain to wrap our cloaks about us, and secure, as best we 
can, a solitude that hears not. I once heard a preacher who 
sorely tempted me to say I would go to church no more. Men 
go, thought I, where they are wont to go, else had no soul 
entered the temple in the afternoon. A snow-storm was falling 
around us. The snow-storm was real; the preacher merely 
spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, 
and then out of the window behind him, into the beautiful 
meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no one word 
intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, 



34o RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever 
lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital 
secret of his profession, namely, to convert life into truth, he 
had not learned. Not one fact in all his experience had he yet 
imported into his doctrine. This man had ploughed, and 
planted, and talked, and bought, and sold ; he had read books ; 
he had eaten and drunken; his head aches; his heart throbs; he 
smiles and suffers; yet was there not a surmise, a hint, in all 
the discourse, that he had ever lived at all. Not a line did he 
draw out of real history. The true preacher can be. known by 
this, that he deals out to the people his life, — life passed 
through the fire of thought. But of the bad preacher, it could 
not be told from his sermon, what age of the world he fell in; 
whether he had a father or a child; whether he was a freeholder 
or a pauper; whether he was a citizen or a countryman; or any 
other fact of his biography. It seemed strange that the people 
should come to church. It seemed as if their houses were very 
unentertaining, that they should prefer this thoughtless clamor. 
It shows that there is a commanding attraction in the moral 
sentiment, that can lend a faint tint of light to dulness and 
ignorance, coming in its name and place. The good hearer is 
sure he has been touched sometimes; is sure there is some- 
what to be reached, and some word that can reach it. When he 
listens to these vain words, he comforts himself by their rela- 
tion to his remembrance of better hours, and so they clatter 
and echo unchallenged. 

I am not ignorant that when we preach unworthily, it is not 
always quite in vain. There is a good ear, in some men, that 
draws supplies to virtue out of very indifferent nutriment. 
There is poetic truth concealed in all the commonplaces of 
prayer and of sermons, and though foolishly spoken, they may 
be wisely heard; for, each is some select expression that broke 
out in a moment of piety from some stricken or jubilant soul, 
and its excellency made it remembered. The prayers and even 
the dogmas of our church are like the zodiac of Denderah, and 
the astronomical monuments of the Hindoos, wholly insulated 
from anything now extant in the life and business of the people. 
They mark the height to which the waters once rose. But this 
docility is a check upon the mischief from the good and devout. 
In a large portion of the community, the religious service gives 



DIVINITY SCHOOL ADDRESS 341 

rise to quite other thoughts and emotions. We need not chide 
the negligent servant. We are struck with pity, rather, at the 
swift retribution of his sloth. Alas for the unhappy man that 
is called to stand in the pulpit, and not give bread of life. Every- 
thing that befalls, accuses him. Would he ask contributions 
for the missions, foreign or domestic? Instantly his face is suf- 
fused with shame, to propose to his parish, that they should 
send money a hundred or a thousand miles, to furnish such 
poor fare as they have at home, and would do well to go the 
hundred or the thousand miles to escape. Would he urge 
people to a godly way of living; and can he ask a fellow-creature 
to come to Sabbath meetings, when he and they all know what 
is the poor uttermost they can hope for therein? Will he in- 
vite them privately to the Lord's Supper? He dares not. If no 
heart warm this rite, the hollow, dry, creaking formality is too 
plain, than that he can face a man of wit and energy, and put 
the invitation without terror. In the street, what has he to say 
to the bold village blasphemer? The village blasphemer sees 
fear in the face, form, and gait of the minister. 

Let me not taint the sincerity of this plea by any oversight 
of the claims of good men. I know and honor the purity and 
strict conscience of numbers of the clergy. What life the public 
worship retains, it owes to the scattered company of pious men, 
who minister here and there in the churches, and who, some- 
times accepting with too great tenderness the tenet of the 
elders, have not accepted from others, but from their own 
heart, the genuine impulses of virtue, and so still command 
our love and awe, to the sanctity of character. Moreover, the 
exceptions are not so much to be found in a few eminent preach- 
ers, as in the better hours, the truer inspirations of all, — nay, 
in the sincere moments of every man. But with whatever ex- 
ception, it is still true, that tradition characterizes the preach- 
ing of this country; that it comes out of the memory, and not 
out of the soul; that it aims at what is usual, and not at what is 
necessary and eternal ; that thus historical Christianity destroys 
the power of preaching, by withdrawing it from the exploration 
of the moral nature of man, where the sublime is, where are the 
resources of astonishment and power. What a cruel injustice 
it is to that Law, the joy of the whole earth, which alone can 
make thought dear and rich ; that Law whose fatal sureness the 



342 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

astronomical orbits poorly emulate, that it is travestied and 
depreciated, that it is behooted and behowled, and not a trait, 
not a word of it articulated. The pulpit, in losing sight of this 
Law, loses its reason, and gropes after it knows not what. And 
for want of this culture, the soul of the community is sick and 
faithless. It wants nothing so much as a stern, high, stoical, 
Christian discipline, to make it know itself and the divinity 
that speaks through it. Now man is ashamed of himself; he 
skulks and sneaks through the world, to be tolerated, to be 
pitied, and scarcely in a thousand years does any man dare to 
be wise and good, and so draw after him the tears and blessings 
of his kind. 

Certainly there have been periods when, from the inactivity 
of the intellect on certain truths, a greater faith was possible 
in names and persons. The Puritans in England and America 
found in the Christ of the Catholic Church, and in the dogmas 
inherited from Rome, scope for their austere piety, and their 
longings for civil freedom. But their creed is passing away, and 
none arises in its room. I think no man can go with his thoughts 
about him into one of our churches, without feeling, that what 
hold the public worship had on men is gone, or going. It has 
lost its grasp on the affection of the good, and the fear of the 
bad. In the country, neighborhoods, half-parishes are signing 
off, — to use the local term. It is already beginning to indicate 
character and religion to withdraw from the religious meetings. 
I have heard a devout person, who prized the Sabbath, say in 
bitterness of heart, "On Sundays, it seems wicked to go to 
church." And the motive that holds the best there, is now only 
a hope and a waiting. What was once a mere circumstance, 
that the best and the worst men in the parish, the poor and 
the rich, the learned and the ignorant, young and old, should 
meet one day as fellows in one house, in sign of an equal right 
in the soul, has come to be a paramount motive for going 
thither. 

My friends, in these two errors, I think, I find the causes of 
a decaying church and a wasting unbelief. And what greater 
calamity can fall upon a nation than the loss of worship? Then 
all things go to decay. Genius leaves the temple, to haunt the 
senate, or the market. Literature becomes frivolous. Science 
is cold. The eye of youth is not lighted by the hope of other 



DIVINITY SCHOOL ADDRESS 343 

worlds, and age is without honor.- Society lives to trifles, and 
when men die, we do not mention them. 

And now, my brothers, you will ask, What in these despond- 
ing days can be done by us? The remedy is already declared in 
the ground of our complaint of the Church. We have con- 
trasted the Church with the Soul. In the soul, then, let the 
redemption be sought. Wherever a man comes, there comes 
revolution. The old is for slaves. When a man comes, all books 
are legible, all things transparent, all religions are forms. He is 
religious. Man is the wonder-worker. He is seen amid miracles. 
All men bless and curse. He saith yea and nay, only. The 
stationariness of religion ; the assumption that the age of inspi- 
ration is past, that the Bible is closed ; the fear of degrading the 
character of Jesus by representing him as a man ; indicate with 
sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology. It is the office 
of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that he speak- 
eth, not spake. The true Christianity — a faith like Christ's 
in the infinitude of man — is lost. None believeth in the soul 
of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. 
Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this 
saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret; they 
cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They 
think society wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, 
and their soul, is wiser than the whole world. See how nations 
and races flit by on the sea of time, and leave no ripple to tell 
where they floated or sunk, and one good soul shall make the 
name of Moses, or of Zeno, or of Zoroaster reverend forever. 
None assayeth the stern ambition to be the Self of the nation, 
and of nature, but each would be an easy secondary to some 
Christian scheme, or sectarian connection, or some eminent 
man. Once leave your own knowledge of God, your own senti- 
ment, and take secondary knowledge, as St. Paul's, or George 
Fox's, or Swedenborg's, and you get wide from God with every 
year this secondary form lasts, and if, as now, for centuries, — 
the chasm yawns to that breadth, that men can scarcely be 
convinced there is in them anything divine. 

Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the 
good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination 
of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. Friends 
enough you shall find who will hold up to your emulation Wes- 



344 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

leys and Oberlins, 1 Saints and Prophets. Thank God for these 
good men, but say, "I also am a man." Imitation cannot go 
above its model. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless 
mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, 
and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else 
is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come 
short of another man's. 

Yourself a new-born bard of the Holy Ghost, — cast behind 
you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. 
Look to it first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, 
pleasure, and money are nothing to you, — are not bandages 
over your eyes, that you cannot see, — but live with the privi- 
lege of the immeasurable mind. Not too anxious to visit periodi- 
cally all families and each family in your parish connection, — 
when you meet one of these men or women, be to them a divine 
man; be to them thought and virtue; let their timid aspirations 
find in you a friend; let their trampled instincts be genially 
tempted out in your atmosphere; let their doubts know that 
you have doubted, and their wonder feel that you have won- 
dered. By trusting your own heart, you shall gain more confi- 
dence in other men. For all our penny-wisdom, for all our soul- 
destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted, that all men 
have sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours 
of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up into 
the vision of principles. We mark with light in the memory the 
few interviews we have had, in the dreary years of routine and 
of sin, with souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke what 
we thought; that told us what we knew; that gave us leave to 
be what we inly were. Discharge to men the priestly office, and, 
present or absent, you shall be followed with their love as by 
an angel. 

And, to this end, let us not aim at common degrees of merit. 
Can we not leave, to such as love it, the virtue that glitters for 
the commendation of society, and ourselves pierce the deep 
solitudes of absolute ability and worth? We easily come up to 
the standard of goodness in society. Society's praise can be 
cheaply secured, and almost all men are content with those 
easy merits; but the instant effect of conversing with God, will 
be to put them away. There are persons who are not actors, 
1 Jean Frederic Oberlin (i 740-1826), a French-German clergyman. 



DIVINITY SCHOOL ADDRESS 345 

not speakers, but influences; persons too great for fame, for 
display; who disdain eloquence; to whom all we call art and 
artist, seems too nearly allied to show and by-ends, to the 
exaggeration of the finite and selfish, and loss of the universal. 
The orators, the poets, the commanders, encroach on us only 
as fair women do, by our allowance and homage. Slight them 
by preoccupation of mind, slight them, as you can well afford 
to do, by high and universal aims, and they instantly feel that 
you have right, and that it is in lower places that they must 
shine. They also feel your right; for they with you are open to 
the influx of the all-knowing Spirit, which annihilates before 
its broad noon the little shades and gradations of intelligence 
in the compositions we call wiser and wisest. 

In such high communion, let us study the grand strokes of 
rectitude; a bold benevolence, an independence of friends, so 
that not the unjust wishes of those who love us, shall impair 
our freedom, but we shall resist for truth's sake the freest flow 
of kindness, and appeal to sympathies far in advance; and — 
what is the highest form in which we know this beautiful ele- 
ment — a certain solidity of merit, that has nothing to do with 
opinion, and which is so essentially and manifestly virtue, that 
it is taken for granted, that the right, the brave, the generous 
step will be taken by it, and nobody thinks of commending it. 
You would compliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but you 
would not praise an angel. The silence that accepts merit as 
the most natural thing in the world, is the highest applause. 
Such souls, when they appear, are the Imperial Guard of 
Virtue, the perpetual reserve, the dictators of fortune. One 
needs not praise their courage, — they are the heart and soul 
of nature. O my friends, there are resources in us on which 
we have not drawn! There are men who rise refreshed on 
hearing a threat; men to whom a crisis which intimidates and 
paralyzes the majority, — demanding not the faculties of pru- 
dence and thrift, but comprehension, immovableness, the readi- 
ness of sacrifice, — comes graceful and beloved as a bride. 
Napoleon said of Massena, 1 that he was not himself until the 
battle began to go against him; then, when the dead began to 
fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination, and 
he put on terror and victory as a robe. So it is in rugged crises, 
1 One of Napoleon's marshals. 



346 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

in unweariable endurance, and in aims which put sympathy 
out of question, that the angel is shown. But these are heights 
that we can scarce remember and look up to, without contrition 
and shame. Let us thank God that such things exist. 

And now let us do what we can to rekindle the smouldering, 
nigh-quenched fire on the altar. The evils of the church that 
now is are manifest. The question returns, What shall we do? 
I confess, all attempts to project and establish a Cultus with 
new rites and forms, seem to me vain. Faith makes us, and 
not we it, and faith makes its own forms. All attempts to con- 
trive a system are as cold as the new worship introduced by 
the French to the goddess of Reason, — to-day, pasteboard 
and filigree, and ending to-morrow in madness and murder. 1 
Rather let the breath of new life be breathed by you through 
the forms already existing. For, if once you are alive, you shall 
find they shall become plastic and new. The remedy to their 
deformity is, first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul. 
A whole popedom of forms, one pulsation of virtue can uplift 
and vivify. Two inestimable advantages Christianity has given 
us: first, the Sabbath, the jubilee of the whole world; whose 
light dawns welcome alike into the closet of the philosopher, 
into the garret of toil, and into prison cells, and everywhere 
suggests, even to the vile, the dignity of spiritual being. Let 
it stand forevermore, a temple, which new love, new faith, new 
sight, shall restore to more than its first splendor to mankind. 
And secondly, the institution of preaching, — the speech of 
man to men, — essentially the most flexible of all organs, of all 
forms. What hinders that now, everywhere, in pulpits, in 
lecture-rooms, in houses, in fields, wherever the invitation of 
men or your own occasions lead you, you speak the very truth, 
as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, 
fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation? 

I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty, which rav- 
ished the souls of those Eastern men, and chiefly of those 
Hebrews, and through their lips spoke oracles to all time, shall 
speak in the West also. The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures con- 
tain immortal sentences, that have been bread of life to millions. 
But they have no epical integrity; are fragmentary; are not 
shown in their order to the intellect. I look for the new Teacher 
1 The French Revolution. 



THE OVER-SOUL 347 

that shall follow so far those shining laws, that he shall see 
them come full circle; shall see their rounding complete grace; 
shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall see the 
identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall 
show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with 
Beauty, and with Joy. 

THE OVER-SOUL 1 

"But souls that of his own good life partake 
He loves as his own self; dear as his eye 
They are to Him: He'll never them forsake: 
When they shall die, then God himself shall die: 
They live, they live in blest eternity." 

Henry More. 

There is a difference between one and another hour of life 
in their authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in 
moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those 
brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to 
them than to all other experiences. For this reason the argu- 
ment which is always forthcoming to silence those who con- 
ceive extraordinary hopes of man, namely the appeal to ex- 
perience, is forever invalid and vain. We give up the past 
to the objector, and yet we hope. He must explain this 
hope. We grant that human life is mean, but how did we 
find out that it was mean? What is the ground of this un- 
easiness of ours; of this old discontent? What is the univer- 
sal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine innuendo by 
which the soul makes its enormous claim? Why do men 
feel that the natural history of man has never been written, 
but he is always leaving behind what you have said of him, 
and it becomes old, and books of metaphysics worthless? The 
philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers 
and magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has al- 
ways remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not 
resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is 
descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact 
calculator has no prescience that somewhat 2 incalculable may 

1 Essays, First Series, published 1841. In "The Over-Soul," says Holmes, 
"Emerson has attempted the impossible. He is as fully conscious of this fact as 
the reader of his rhapsody, — nay, he is more profoundly penetrated with it 
than any of his readers." 

2 A noun, as commonly in Emerson. 



'348 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

not balk the very next moment. I am constrained every mo- 
ment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will 
I call mine. 

As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that 
flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a 
season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner ; not a 
cause but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I 
desire and look up and put myself in the attitude of reception, 
but from some alien energy the visions come. 

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the 
present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that 
great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the soft arms 
of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-Soul, within which 
every man's particular being is contained and made one with 
all other; that common heart of which all sincere conversation 
is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that 
overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and 
constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from 
his character and not from his tongue, and which evermore 
tends to pass into our thought and hand and become wis- 
dom and virtue and power and beauty. We live in succes- 
sion, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man 
is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, 
to which every part and particle is equally related ; the eternal 
One. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beati- 
tude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect 
in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the 
seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. 
We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the 
animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shin- 
ing parts, is the soul. Only by the vision of that Wisdom 
can the horoscope of the ages be read, and by falling back 
on our better thoughts, by yielding to the spirit of prophecy 
which is innate in every man, we can know what it saith. 
Every man's words who speaks from that life must sound 
vain to those who do not dwell in the same thought on their 
own part. I dare not speak for it. My words do not carry its 
august sense; they fall short and cold. Only itself can inspire 
whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be lyrical, and 
sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind. Yet I desire, 



THE OVER-SOUL 349 

even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the 
heaven of this deity and to report what hints I have collected 
of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law. 

If we consider what happens in conversation, in reveries, in 
remorse, in times of passion, in surprises, in the instructions of 
dreams, wherein often we see ourselves in masquerade, — the 
droll disguises only magnifying and enhancing a real element 
and forcing it on our distant notice, — we shall catch many 
hints that will broaden and lighten into knowledge of the secret 
of nature. All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, • 
but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, 
like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but 
uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a. light; is 
not the intellect or the will, "but the master of the intellect and 
the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie, — 
an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. 
From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon 
things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light 
is all. A man is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom 
and all good abide. What we commonly call man, the eating, 
drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, 
represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not 
respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it ap- 
pear through his action, would make our knees bend. When, 
it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes 
through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, 
it is love. And the blindness of the intellect begins when it 
would be something of itself. The weakness of the will begins 
when the individual would be something of himself. All reform 
aims in some one particular to let the soul have its way 
through us; in other words, to engage us to obey. 

Of this pure nature every man is at some time sensible. Lan- 
guage cannot paint it with his colors. It is too subtile. It is 
undefmable, unmeasurable; but we know that it pervades and 
contains us. We know that all spiritual being is in man. A 
wise old proverb says, "God comes to see us without bell"; 
that is, as there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and 
the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul, where 
man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls 
are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spirit- 



35o RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

ual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, 
Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever got above, 
but they tower over us, and most in the moment when our 
interests tempt us to wound them. 

The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak is made 
known by its independency of those limitations which circum- 
scribe us on every hand. The soul circumscribes all things. 
As I have said, it contradicts all experience. In like manner it 
abolishes time and space. The influence of the senses has in 
■most men overpowered the mind to that degree that the walls 
of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable; 
and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the 
sign of insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse measures 
of the force of the soul. The spirit sports with time, — 

" Can crowd eternity into an hour, 
Or stretch an hour to eternity." 

We are often made to feel that there is another youth and 
age than that which is measured from the year of our natural 
birth. Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. 
Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty. 
Every man parts from that contemplation with the feeling that 
it rather belongs to ages than to mortal life. The least activity 
of the intellectual powers redeems us in a degree from the condi- 
tions of time. In sickness, in languor, give us a strain of poetry 
or a profound sentence, and we are refreshed; or produce a 
volume of Plato or Shakespeare, or remind us of their names, 
and instantly we come into a feeling of longevity. See how 
the deep divine thought reduces centuries and millenniums, 
and makes itself present through all ages. Is the teaching of 
Christ less effective now than it was when first his mouth was 
opened? The emphasis of facts and persons in my thought has 
nothing to do with time. And so always the soul's scale is 
one, the scale of the senses and the understanding is another. 
Before the revelations of the soul, Time, Space, and Nature 
shrink away. In common speech we refer all things to time, 
as we habitually refer the immensely sundered stars to one 
concave sphere. And so we say that the Judgment is distant 
or near, that the Millennium approaches, that a day of cer- 
tain political, moral, social reforms is at hand, and the like, 



THE OVER-SOUL 351 

when we mean that in the nature of things one of the facts 
we contemplate is external and fugitive, and the other is per- 
manent and connate with the soul. The things we now esteem 
fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves like ripe fruit from 
our experience, and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows 
whither. The landscape, the figures, Boston, London, are facts 
as fugitive as any institution past, or any whiff of mist or 
smoke, and so is society, and so is the world. The soul looketh 
steadily forwards, creating a world before her, leaving worlds 
behind her. She has no dates, nor rites, nor persons, nor spe- 
cialties, nor men. The soul knows only the soul; the web of 
events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed. 

After its own law and not by arithmetic is the rate of its 
progress to be computed. The soul's advances are not made 
by gradation, such as can be represented by motion in a 
straight line, but rather by ascension of state, such as can be 
represented by metamorphosis, — from the egg to the worm, 
from the worm to the fly. The growths of genius are of a cer- 
tain total character, that does not advance the elect individual 
first over John, then Adam, then Richard, and give to each the 
pain of discovered inferiority, — but by every throe of growth 
the man expands there where he works, passing, at each pulsa- 
tion, classes, populations, of men. With each divine impulse 
the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and 
comes out into eternity, and inspires and expires its air. It 
converses with truths that have always been spoken in the 
world, and becomes conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno 
and Arrian than with persons in the house. 

This is the law of moral and of mental gain. The simple rise 
as by specific levity not into a particular virtue, but into the 
region of all the virtues. They are in the spirit which contains 
them all. The soul requires purity, but purity is not it; re- 
quires justice, but justice is not that; requires beneficence, but 
is somewhat better; so that there is a kind of descent and ac- 
commodation felt when we leave speaking of moral nature to 
urge a virtue which it enjoins. To the well-born child all the 
virtues are natural, and not painfully acquired. Speak to his 
heart, and the man becomes suddenly virtuous. 

Within the same sentiment is the germ of intellectual growth, 
which obeys the same law. Those who are capable of humility, 



352 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

of justice, of love, of aspiration, stand already on aplatformthat 
commands the sciences and arts, speech and poetry, action and 
grace. For whoso dwells in this moral beatitude already 
anticipates those special powers which men prize so highly. The 
lover has no talent, no skill, which passes for quite nothing with 
his enamored maiden, however little she may possess of re- 
lated faculty; and the heart which abandons itself to the 
Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its works, and will 
travel a royal road to particular knowledges and powers. In 
ascending to this primary and aboriginal sentiment we have 
come from our remote station on the circumference instantane- 
ously to the centre of the world, where, as in the closet of God, 
we see causes, and anticipate the universe, which is but a slow 
effect. 

One mode of the divine teaching is the incarnation of the 
spirit in a form, — in forms, like my own. I live in society; 
with persons who answer to thoughts in my own mind, or 
express a certain obedience to the great instincts to which 
I live. I see its presence to them. I am certified of a common 
nature; and these other souls, these separated selves, draw 
me as nothing else can. They stir in me the new emotions we 
call passion; of love, hatred, fear, admiration, pity; thence 
come conversation, competition, persuasion, cities, and war. 
Persons are supplementary to the primary teaching of the soul. 
In youth we are mad for persons. Childhood and youth see all 
the world in them. But the larger experience of man discovers 
the identical nature appearing through them all. Persons 
themselves acquaint us with the impersonal. In all conversa- 
tion between two persons tacit reference is made, as to a third 
party, to a common nature. That third party or common 
nature is not social; it is impersonal; is God. And so in groups 
where debate is earnest, and especially on high questions, 
the company become aware that the thought rises to an equal 
level in all bosoms, that all have a spiritual property in what 
was said, as well as the sayer. They all become wiser than 
they were. It arches over them like a temple, this unity of 
thought in which every heart beats with nobler sense of 
power and duty, and thinks and acts with unusual solemnity. 
All are conscious of attaining to a higher self-possession. It 
shines for all. There is a certain wisdom of humanity which 



THE OVER-SOUL 353 

is common to the greatest men with the lowest, and which 
our ordinary education often labors to silence and obstruct. 
The mind is one, and the best minds, who love truth for its 
own sake, think much less of property in truth. They accept 
it thankfully everywhere, and do not label or stamp it with 
any man's name, for it is theirs long beforehand, and from 
eternity. The learned and the studious of thought have no 
monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some 
degree disqualifies them to think truly. We owe many valu- 
able observations to people who are not very acute or pro- 
found, and who say the thing without effort which we want 
and have long been hunting in vain. The action of the soul 
is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid than in that 
which is said in any conversation. It broods over every society, 
and they unconsciously seek for it in each other. We know 
better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves, and we 
know at the same time that we are much more. I feel the same 
truth how often in my trivial conversation with my neighbors, 
that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks this by-play, and 
Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us. 

Men descend to meet. In their habitual and mean service 
to the world, for which they forsake their native nobleness, 
they resemble those Arabian sheiks who dwell in mean 
houses and affect an external poverty, to escape the rapacity 
of the Pacha, and reserve all their display of wealth for their 
interior and guarded retirements. 

As it is present in all persons, so it is in every period of life. 
It is adult already in the infant man. In my dealing with my 
child, my Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and my 
money stead me nothing; but as much soul as I have avails. 
If I am wilful, he sets his will against mine, one for one, and 
leaves me, if I please, the degradation of beating him by my 
superiority of strength. But if I renounce my will and act 
for the soul, setting that up as umpire between us two, out of 
his young eyes looks the same soul ; he reveres and loves with me. 

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know 
truth when we see it, let sceptic and scoffer say what they 
choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what 
they do not wish to hear, "How do you know it is truth, and 
not an error of your own?" We know truth when we see it, 



354 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are 
awake. It was a grand sentence of Emanuel Swedenborg, 
which would alone indicate the greatness of that man's percep- 
tion, — "It is no proof of a man's understanding to be able to 
affirm whatever he pleases ; but to be able to discern that what 
is true is true, and that what is false is false, — this is the mark 
and character of intelligence. " In the book I read, the good 
thought returns to me, as every truth will, the image of the 
whole soul. To the bad thought which I find in it, the same 
soul becomes a discerning, separating sword, and lops it away. 
We are wiser than we know. If we will not interfere with our 
thought, but -will act entirely, or see how the thing stands in 
God, we know the particular thing, and every thing, and every 
man. For the Maker of all things and all persons stands behind 
us and casts his dread omniscience through us over things. 

But beyond this recognition of its own in particular passages 
of the individual's experience, it also reveals truth. And here 
we should seek to reinforce ourselves by its very presence, and 
to speak with a worthier, loftier strain of that advent. For the 
soul's communication of truth is the highest event in nature, 
since it then does not give somewhat from itself, but it gives 
itself, or passes into and becomes that man whom it enlightens; 
or in proportion to that truth he receives, it takes him to itself. 

We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its mani- 
festations of its own nature, by the term Revelation. These 
are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this 
communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. 
It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges 
of the sea of life. Every distinct apprehension of this central 
commandment agitates men with awe and delight. A thrill 
passes through all men at the reception of new truth, or at the 
performance of a great action, which comes out of the heart of 
nature. In these communications the power to see is not sepa- 
rated from the will to do, but the insight proceeds from obedi- 
ence, and the obedience proceeds from a joyful perception. 
Every moment when the individual feels himself invaded 
by it is memorable. By the necessity of our constitution a 
certain enthusiasm attends the individual's consciousness of 
that divine presence. The character and duration of this 
enthusiasm vary with the state of the individual, from an 



THE OVER-SOUL 355 

ecstasy and trance and prophetic inspiration, — which is its 
rarer appearance, — to the faintest glow of virtuous emotion, in 
which form it warms, like our household fires, all the families 
and associations of men, and makes society possible. A certain 
tendency to insanity has always attended the opening of the 
religious sense in men, as if they had been " blasted with excess 
of light." The trances of Socrates, the "union" of Plotinus, 
the vision of Porphyry, the conversion of Paul, the aurora of 
Behmen, * the convulsions of George Fox and his Quakers, the 
illumination of Swedenborg, are of this kind. What was in the 
case of these remarkable persons a ravishment, has, in innumer- 
able instances in common life, been exhibited in less striking 
manner. Everywhere the history of religion betrays a tendency 
to enthusiasm. The rapture of the Moravian and Quietist; the 
opening of the eternal sense of the Word, in the language of 
the New Jerusalem Church; the revival of the Calvinistic 
churches; the experiences of the Methodists, are varying forms 
of that shudder of awe and delight with which the individual 
soul always mingles with the universal soul. 

The nature of these revelations is the same; they are per- 
ceptions of the absolute law. They are solutions of the soul's 
own questions. They do not answer the questions which the 
understanding asks. The soul answers never by words, but 
by the thing itself that is inquired after. 

Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The popular notion 
of a revelation is that it is a telling of fortunes. In past oracles 
of the soul the understanding seeks to find answers to sensual 
questions, and undertakes to tell from God how long men shall 
exist, what their hands shall do and who shall be their com- 
pany, adding names and dates and places. But we must pick 
no locks. We must check, this low curiosity. An answer in 
words is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions you 
ask. Do not require a description of the countries towards 
which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, 
and to-morrow you arrive there and know them by inhabiting 
them. Men ask concerning the immortality of the soul, the 
employments of heaven, the state of the sinner, and so forth. 
They even dream that Jesus has left replies to precisely these 
interrogatories. Never a moment did that sublime spirit speak 
1 Jakob Behmen, or Bohme, or Bohm (1575-1624), a German mystic. 



356 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

in their patois. To truth, justice, love, the attributes of the 
soul, the idea of immutableness is essentially associated. Jesus, 
living in these moral sentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes, 
heeding only the manifestations of these, never made the sepa- 
ration of the idea of duration from the essence of these attri- 
butes, nor uttered a syllable concerning the duration of the 
soul. It was left to his disciples to sever duration from the 
moral elements, and to teach the immortality of the soul as a 
doctrine, and maintain it by evidences. The moment the doc- 
trine of the immortality is separately taught, man is already 
fallen. In the flowing of love, in the adoration of humility, 
there is no question of continuance. No inspired man ever asks 
this question or condescends to these evidences. For the soul 
is true to itself, and the man in whom it is shed abroad cannot 
wander from the present, which is infinite, to a future which 
would be finite. 

These questions which we lust to ask about the future are a 
confession of sin. God has no answer for them. No answer in 
words can reply to a question of things. It is not in an arbi- 
trary "decree of God," but in the nature of man, that a veil 
shuts down on the facts of to-morrow; for the soul will not have 
us read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. By this 
veil which curtains events it instructs the children of men to 
live in to-day. The only mode of obtaining an answer to these 
questions of the senses is to forego all low curiosity, and, accept- 
ing the tide of being which floats us into the secret of nature, 
work and live, work and live, and all unawares the advancing 
soul has built and forged for itself a new condition, and the 
question and the answer are one. 

By the same fire, vital, consecrating, celestial, which burns 
until it shall dissolve all things into the waves and surges of 
an ocean of light, we see and know each other, and what spirit 
each is of. Who can tell the grounds of his knowledge of the 
character of the several individuals in his circle of friends? No 
man. Yet their acts and words do not disappoint him. In 
that man, though he knew no ill of him, he put no trust. In 
that other, though they had seldom met, authentic signs had 
yet passed, to signify that he might be trusted as one who had 
an interest in his own character. We know each other very 
well, — which of us has been just to himself and whether 



THE OVER-SOUL * 357 

that which we teach or behold is only an aspiration or is our 
honest effort also. 

We are all discerners of spirits. That diagnosis lies aloft in 
our life or unconscious power. The intercourse of society, its 
trade, its religion, its friendships, its quarrels, is one wide 
judicial investigation of character. In full court, or in small 
committee, or confronted face to face, accuser and accused, 
men offer themselves to be judged. Against their will they 
exhibit those decisive trifles by which character is read. But 
who judges? and what? Not our understanding. We do not 
read them by learning or craft. No; the wisdom of the wise 
man consists herein, that he does not judge them; he lets 
them judge themselves, and merely reads and records their 
own verdict. 

By virtue of this inevitable nature, private will is over- 
powered, and, maugre our efforts or our imperfections, your 
genius will speak from you, and mine from me. That which 
we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily but involuntarily. 
Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never 
left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues 
which we never voluntarily opened. Character teaches over 
our head. The infallible index of true progress is found in the 
tone the man takes. Neither. his age, nor his breeding, nor 
company, nor books, nor actions, nor talents, nor all together 
can hinder him from being deferential to a higher spirit than 
his own. If he have not found his home in God, his manners, 
his forms of speech, the turn of his sentences, the build, shall 
I say, of all his opinions will involuntarily confess it, let him 
brave it out how he will. If he have found his centre, the Deity 
will shine through him, through all the disguises of ignorance, 
of ungenial temperament, of unfavorable circumstance. The 
tone of seeking is one, and the tone of having is another. 

The great distinction between teachers sacred or literary, — 
between poets like Herbert, and poets like Pope, — between 
philosophers like Spinoza, Kant, and Coleridge, and philoso- 
phers like Locke, Paley, Mackintosh, and Stewart, — between 
men of the world who are reckoned accomplished talkers, and 
here and there a fervent mystic, prophesying half insane under 
the infinitude of his thought, — is that one class speak from 
within, or from experience, as parties and possessors of the 



358 - RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

fact; and the other class from without, as spectators merely, 
or perhaps as acquainted with the fact on the evidence of third 
persons. It is of no use to preach to me from without. I can do 
that too easily myself. Jesus speaks always from within, and 
in a degree that transcends all others. In that is the miracle. 
I believe beforehand that it ought so to be. All men stand 
continually in the expectation of the appearance of such a 
teacher. But if a man do not speak from within the veil, where 
the word -is one with that it tells of, let him lowly confess it. 
The same Omniscience flows into the intellect and makes 
what we call genius. Much of the wisdom of the world is not 
wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no doubt 
superior to literary fame, and are not writers. Among the 
multitude of scholars and authors we feel no hallowing pres- 
ence; we are sensible of a knack and skill rather than of inspi- 
ration; they have a light and know not whence it comes and 
call it their own; their talent is some exaggerated faculty, some 
overgrown member, so that their strength is a disease. In these 
instances the intellectual gifts do not make the impression of 
virtue, but almost of vice; and we feel that a man's talents 
stand in the way of his advancement in truth. But genius is 
religious. It is a larger imbibing of the common heart. It is 
not anomalous, but more like and not less like other men. 
There is in all great poets a wisdom of humanity which is 
superior to any talents they exercise. The author, the wit, the 
partisan, the fine gentleman, does not take place of the man. 
Humanity shines in Homer, in Chaucer, in Spenser, in Shake- 
speare, in Milton. They are content with truth. They use the 
positive degree. They seem frigid and phlegmatic to those 
who have been spiced with the frantic passion and violent 
coloring of inferior but popular writers. For they are poets by 
the free course which they allow to the informing soul, which 
through their eyes beholds again and blesses the things which 
it hath made. The soul is superior to its knowledge, wiser 
than any of its works. The great poet makes us feel our 
own wealth, and then we think less of his compositions. His 
best communication to our mind is to teach us to despise all 
he has done. Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of 
intelligent activity as to suggest a wealth which beggars his 
own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has 



THE OVER-SOUL 359 

created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self- 
existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the 
shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration 
which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as 
good from day to day forever. Why then should I make 
account of Hamlet and Lear, as if we had not the soul from 
which they fell as syllables from the tongue? 

This energy does not descend into individual life on any other 
condition than entire possession. It comes to the lowly and 
simple ; it comes to whomsoever will put off what is foreign and 
proud; it comes as insight; it comes as serenity and grandeur. 
When we see those whom it inhabits, we are apprised of new 
degrees of greatness. From that inspiration the man comes 
back with a changed tone. He does not talk with men with an 
eye to their opinion. He tries them. It requires of us to be 
plain and true. The vain traveller attempts to embellish his 
life by quoting my lord and the prince and the countess, 
who thus said or did to .him. The ambitious vulgar show you 
their spoons and brooches and rings, and preserve their cards 
and compliments. The more cultivated, in their account of 
their own experience, cull out the pleasing, poetic circumstance, 

— the visit to Rome, the man of genius they saw, the brilliant 
friend they know; still further on perhaps the gorgeous land- 
scape, the mountain lights, the mountain thoughts they en- 
joyed yesterday, — and so seek to throw a romantic color over 
their life. But the soul that ascends to worship the great God 
is plain and true; has no rose-color, no fine friends, no chiv- 
alry, no adventures; does not want admiration; dwells in the 
hour that now is, in the earnest experience of the common day, 

— by reason of the present moment and the mere trifle having 
become porous to thought and bibulous of the sea of light. 

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature 
looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthi- 
est to be written, yet are they so cheap and so things of course, 
that in the infinite riches of the soul it is like gathering a few 
pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when 
the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours. Nothing 
can pass there, or make you one of the circle, but the casting 
aside your trappings and dealing man to man in naked truth, 
plain confession and omniscient affirmation. t 



3 6o • RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

' ' Souls such as these treat you as gods would, walk as gods in 
the earth, accepting without any admiration your wit, your 
bounty, your virtue even, — say rather your act of duty, for 
your virtue they own as their proper blood, royal as themselves, 
and over-royal, and the father of the gods. But what rebuke 
their plain fraternal bearing casts on the mutual flattery with 
which authors solace each other and wound themselves ! These 
flatter not. I do not wonder that these men go to see Cromwell 
and Christina and Charles II and James I and the Grand 
Turk. For they are, in their own elevation, the fellows of kings, 
and must feel the servile tone of conversation in the world. 
They must always be a godsend to princes, for they confront 
them, a king to a king, without ducking or concession, and give 
a high nature the refreshment and satisfaction of resistance, of 
plain humanity, of even companionship, and of new ideas. 
They leave them wiser and superior men. Souls like these 
make us feel that sincerity is more excellent than flattery. 
Deal so plainly with man and woman as to constrain the ut- 
most sincerity and destroy all hope of trifling with you. It is 
the highest compliment you can pay. Their ''highest prais- 
ing," said Milton, "is not flattery, and their plainest advice is 
a kind of praising." 

Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the 
soul. The simplest person who in his integrity worships God, 
becomes God; yet forever and ever the influx of this better and 
universal self is new and unsearchable. It inspires awe and 
astonishment. How dear, how soothing to man, arises the idea 
of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the scars of our mis- 
takes and disappointments! When we have broken our god of 
tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God 
fire the heart with his presence. It is the doubling of the heart 
itself, nay, the infinite enlargement of the heart with a power of 
growth to a new infinity on every side. It inspires in man an 
infallible trust. He has not the conviction, but the sight, that 
the best is the true, and may in that thought easily dismiss all 
particular uncertainties and fears, and adjourn to the sure 
revelation of time the solution of his private riddles. He is sure 
that his welfare is dear to the heart of being. In the presence of 
law to his mind he is overflowed with a reliance so universal 
that it sweeps away all cherished hopes and the most stable 



THE OVER-SOUL 361 

projects of mortal condition in its flood. He believes that he 
cannot escape from his good. The things that are really for 
thee gravitate to thee. You are running to seek your friend. 
Let your feet run, but your mind need not. If you do not find 
him, will you not acquiesce that it is best you should not find 
him? for there is a power, which, as it is in you, is in him also, 
and could therefore very well bring you together, if it were for 
the best. You are preparing with eagerness to go and render 
a service to which your talent and your taste invite you, the 
love of men and the hope of fame. Has it not occurred to you 
that you have no right to go, unless you are equally willing to 
be prevented from going? O, believe, as thou livest, that every 
sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou ought- 
est to hear, will vibrate on thine ear. Every proverb, every 
book, every byword that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, 
shall surely come home through open or winding passages. 
Every friend whom not thy fantastic will but the great and 
tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. 
And this because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a 
valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in 
nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circu- 
lation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, 
and, truly seen, its tide is one. 

Let man then learn the revelation of all nature and all 
thought to his heart; this, namely; that the Highest dwells 
with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind, if the 
sentiment of duty is there. But if he would know what the 
great God speaketh, he must "go into his closet and shut the 
door," as Jesus said. God will not make himself manifest to 
cowards. He must greatly listen to himself, withdrawing him- 
self from all the accents of other men's devotion. Even their 
prayers are hurtful to him, until he have made his own. Our 
religion vulgarly stands on numbers of believers. Whenever 
the appeal is made, — no matter how indirectly, — to num- 
bers, proclamation is then and there made that religion is 
not. He that finds God a sweet enveloping thought to him 
never counts his company. When I sit in that presence, who 
shall dare to come in? When I rest in perfect humility, when 
I burn with pure love, what can Calvin or Swedenborg say? 

It makes no difference whether the appeal is to numbers or 



362 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

to one. The faith that stands on authority is not faith. The 
reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the with- 
drawal of the soul. The position men have given to Jesus, now 
for many centuries of history, is a position of authority. It 
characterizes themselves. It cannot alter the eternal facts. 
Great is the soul, and plain. It is no flatterer, it is no follower; 
it never appeals from itself. It believes in itself. Before the 
immense possibilities of man all mere experience, all past 
biography, however spotless and sainted, shrinks away. Before 
that heaven which our presentiments foreshow us, we can- 
not easily praise any form of life we have seen or read of. We 
not only affirm that we have few great men, but, absolutely 
speaking, that we have none; that we have no history, no 
record of any character or mode of living that entirely contents 
us. The saints and demigods whom history worships we are 
constrained to accept with a grain of allowance. Though in 
our lonely hours we draw a new strength out of their memory, 
yet, pressed on our attention, as they are by the thoughtless 
and customary, they fatigue and invade. The soul gives itself, 
alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, 
who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks 
through it. Then is it glad, young, and nimble. It is not wise, 
but it sees through all things. It is not called religious, but it is 
innocent. It calls the light its own, and feels that the grass 
grows and the stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on, 
its nature. Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, the uni- 
versal mind. I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am 
somehow receptive of the great soul, and thereby I do overlook 
the sun and the stars and feel them to be the fair accidents 
and effects which change and pass. More and more the surges 
of everlasting nature enter into me, and I become public and 
human in my regards and actions. So come I to live in thoughts 
and act with energies which are immortal. Thus revering the 
soul, and learning, as the ancient said, that "its beauty is im- 
mense," man will come to see that the world is the perennial 
miracle which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at par- 
ticular wonders; he will learn that there is no profane history; 
that all history is sacred; that the universe is represented in 
an atom, in a moment of time. He will weave no longer a 
spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live with a divine 



SELF-RELIANCE 363 

unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous in his 
life and be content with all places and with any service he 
can render. He will calmly front the morrow in the negligency 
of that trust which carries God with it and so hath already the 
whole future in the bottom of the heart. 



SELF-RELIANCE * 

"Ne te quaesiveris extra." 

"Man is his own star; and the soul that can 
Render an honest and a perfect man, 
Commands all light, all influence, all fate; 
Nothing to him falls early or too late. 
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, 
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still." 
Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune. 

"Cast the bantling on the rocks, 
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat, 
Wintered with the hawk and fox, 
Power and speed be hands and feet." 

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent 
painter which were original and not conventional. The soul 
always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be 
what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than 
any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, 
to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true 
for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, 
and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time 
becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back 
to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the 
voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to 
Moses, Plato, and Milton is that they set at naught books and 
traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. 
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light 
which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre 
of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without 
notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius 

1 Essays, First Series. The relation between the doctrine of self-reliance and 
the doctrine of the Over-Soul is clearly indicated by Emerson in an address deliv- 
ered before the Anti-Slavery Society in New York, March 7, 1854: "self-reliance, 
the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God." In " Self-Reliance," how- 
ever, the emphasis is always on the self, the single man, from the three mottoes 
onward: "Seek not beyond yourself"; "Man is his own star"; the babe edu- 
cated in self-reliance will excel. 



364 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us 
with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no 
more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide 
by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility 
then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. 
Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense 
precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we 
shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from 
another. 

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at 
the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; 
that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; 
that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of 
nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed 
on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power 
which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows 
what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has 
tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes 
much impression on him and another none. This sculpture in 
the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye 
was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of 
that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are 
ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It 
may be safely intrusted as proportionate and of good issues, 
so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work 
made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when 
he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what 
he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a 
deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius 
deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope. 

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Ac- 
cept the place the divine providence has found for you, the 
society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. 
Great men have always done so, and confided themselves child- 
like to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that 
the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working 
through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we 
are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same 
transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a pro- 
tected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but 



SELF-RELIANCE 365 

guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty 
effort and advancing on Chaos and the Dark. 

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text in the face 
and behavior of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided 
and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arith- 
metic has computed the strength and means opposed to our 
purpose, these have net. Their mind being whole, their eye 
is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces we are 
disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it; 
so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults 
who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and 
puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and 
charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to 
be put by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has 
no force, because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in 
the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic. It 
seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries. Bashful 
or bold then, he will know how to make us seniors very un- 
necessary. 

The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would 
disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, 
is the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlor 
what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, 
looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, 
he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, sum- 
mary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, 
troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, 
about interests; he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You 
must court him; he does not court you. But the man is as it 
were clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has 
once acted or spoken with eclat he is a committed person, 
watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose 
affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe 
for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who 
can thus avoid all pledges and, having observed, observe again 
from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted 
innocence, — must always be formidable. He would utter 
opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to be not pri- 
vate but necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men 
and put them in fear. 



366 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they 
grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society 
everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one 
of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which 
the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each 
shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. 
The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its 
aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and 
customs. 

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who 
would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the 
name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing 
is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve 
you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I 
remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted 
to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me 
with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, 
"What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live 
wholly from within?" my friend suggested, — "But these 
impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, 
"They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's 
child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can be sacred 
to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names 
very readily transferable to that or this ; the only right is what 
is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it. 
A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if 
everything were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed 
to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to 
large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well- 
spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I 
ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all 
ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, 
shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause 
of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barba- 
does, why should I not say to him, "Go love thy infant; love 
thy wood-chopper; be good-natured and modest; have that 
grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition 
with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles 
off. Thy love afar is spite at home." Rough and graceless 
would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the 



SELF-RELIANCE 367 

affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, 
— else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached, as 
the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that pules and 
whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother when 
my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door- 
post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, 
but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to 
show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then again, 
do not tell me. as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to 
put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell 
thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the 
dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and 
to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom 
by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will 
go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular chari- 
ties ; the education at college of fools ; the building of meeting- 
houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, 
and the thousand-fold Relief Societies; — though I confess 
with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a 
wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to 
withhold. 

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception 
than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what 
is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, 
much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appear- 
ance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or exten- 
uation of their living in the world, — as invalids and the insane 
pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to 
expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. 
I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genu- 
ine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. 
I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and 
bleeding. I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse 
this appeal from the man to his actions. I know that for my- 
self it makes no difference whether I do or forbear those actions 
which are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a 
privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my 
gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assur- 
ance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony. 

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people 



368 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual 
life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and 
meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those 
who think they know what is your duty better than you know 
it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is 
easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he 
who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the 
independence of solitude. 
N/, fc The objection to conforming to usages that have become 
dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time 
and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a 
dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a 
great party either for the government or against it, spread 
your table like base housekeepers, — under all these screens I 
have difficulty to detect the precise man you are : and of course 
so much force is withdrawn from all your proper life. But do 
your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall 
reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blind-man's- 
buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect I antici- 
pate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text 
and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. 
Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new 
and spontaneous word? Do I not know that with all this osten- 
tation of examining the grounds of the institution he will do 
no such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not 
to look but at one side, the permitted side, not as a man, but as 
a parish minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs of 
-the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have 
bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and at- 
tached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. 
This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, 
authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every 
trufth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four 
not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us and 
we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature 
is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to 
which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, 
and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression. There 
is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to 
wreak itself also in the general history; I mean the "foolish 



SELF-RELIANCE 369 

face of praise," the forced smile which we put on in company 
where we do not feel at ease, in answer to conversation which 
does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved 
but moved by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the 
outline of the face, with the most disagreeable sensation. 

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. 
And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. 
The by-standers look askance on him in the public street or in 
the friend's parlor. If this aversion had its origin in contempt 
and resistance like his own he might well go home with a sad 
countenance; but the sour faces of the multitude, like their 
sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the 
wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is the discontent of 
the multitude more formidable than that of the senate and the 
college. It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the world 
to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is deco- 
rous and prudent, for they are timid, as being very vulnerable 
themselves. But when to their feminine rage the indignation 
of the people is added, when the ignorant and the poor are 
aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the 
bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it needs the habit 
of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no 
concernment. 

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consist- 
ency ; a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of 
others have no other data for computing our orbit than our 
past acts, and we are loth to disappoint them. 

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? 
Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contra- 
dict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? 
Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems 
to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, 
scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for 
judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a 
new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality 
to the Deity, yet when the devout motions of the soul come, 
yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God 
with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat 
in the hand of the harlot, and flee. 

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored 



370 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With con- 
sistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well 
concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you 
think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow 
thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything 
you said to-day. — "Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunder- 
stood." — Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras 
was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and 
Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise 
spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. 

I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of 
his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequali- 
ties of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of 
the sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him. 
A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; — read it 
forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. 1 In 
this pleasing contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me 
record day by day my honest thought without prospect or ret- 
rospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, 
though I mean it not and see it not. My book should smell of 
pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over 
my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries 
in his bill into my web also. We pass for what we are. Charac- 
ter teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communi- 
cate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see 
that virtue or vice, emit a breath every moment. 

There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, 
so they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of one 
will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. 
These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little 
height of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage 
of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line 
from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the aver- 
age tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself and will 
explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains 
nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly 
will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can 
be firm enough to-day to do right and scorn eyes, I must have 

1 The description fits a palindrome, not an acrostic, or an Alexandrian stanza, 
whatever Emerson may have meant by that. 



SELF-RELIANCE 371 

done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it 
will, do right now. Always scorn appearances and you always 
may. The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone 
days of virtue work their health into this. What makes the 
majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills 
the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days 
and victories behind. They shed a united light on the advanc- 
ing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels. That 
is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and dignity 
into Washington's port, and America into Adams's eye. 1 
Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemera. It is always 
ancient virtue. We worship it to-day because it is not of to- 
day. We love it and pay it homage because it is not a trap for 
our love and homage, but is self-dependent, self-derived, and 
therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a 
young person. 

I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity 
and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous 
henceforward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a 
whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us never bow and apologize 
more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish 
to please him; I wish that he would wish to please me. I will 
stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, 
I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth 
mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the 
face of custom and trade and office, the fact which is the upshot 
of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and 
Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs 
to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. Where he 
is there is nature. He measures you and all men and all events. 
Ordinarily, everybody in society reminds us of somewhat else, 
or of some other person. Character, reality, reminds you of 
nothing else; it takes place of 2 the whole creation. The man 
must be so much that he must make all circumstances indiffer- 
ent. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires 
infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his 
design ; — and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of 
clients. A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a 

1 Probably Samuel Adams, perhaps John Adams. 

2 Takes precedence of. 



372 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow 
and cleave to his genius that he is confounded with virtue and 
the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow 
of one man; as, Monachism, of the Hermit Antony; * the 
Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of 
Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. 2 Scipio, Milton called "the 
height of Rome"; and all history resolves itself very easily 
into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons. 

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his 
feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the 
air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper in the world 
which exists for him. But the man in the street, finding no worth 
in himself which corresponds to the force which built a tower or 
sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these. 
To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an alien and 
forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like 
that, "Who are you, Sir?" Yet they all are his, suitors for his 
notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and 
take possession. The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to 
command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popu- 
lar fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, 
carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the 
duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious 
ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, 
owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the 
state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then 
wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince. 3 

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history our 
imagination plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and 
estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward 
in a small house and common day's work; but the things of life 
are the same to both; the sum total of both is the same. Why 
all this deference to Alfred and Scanderbeg and Gustavus? 
Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue? As great 
a stake depends on your private act to-day as followed their 
public and renowned steps. When private men shall act with 

1 St. Anthony (251-356), the Egyptian founder of monastic life. 

2 Thomas Clarkson (1 760-1846), an English philanthropist. 

3 See Induction of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew; or Arabian Nights' 
Entertainments, under "Abou Hassam; or, The Sleeper Awakened." 



SELF-RELIANCE 373 

original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions 
of kings to those of gentlemen. 

The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so mag- 
netized the eyes of nations. It has been taught by this colossal 
symbol the mutual reverence that is due from man to man. 
The joyful loyalty with which men have everywhere suffered 
the king, the noble, or the great proprietor to walk among 
them by a law of his own, make his own scale of men and things 
and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with money but with 
honor, and represent the law in his person, was the hieroglyphic 
by which they obscurely signified their consciousness of their 
own right and comeliness, the right of every man. 

The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained 
when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? 
What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may 
be grounded? What is the nature and power of that science- 
baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, 
which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure 
actions, if the least mark of independence appear ? The inquiry 
leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, 
and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote 
this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are 
tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis 
cannot go, all things find their common origin. For the sense 
of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the 
soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from 
time, from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously 
from the same source whence their life and being also proceed. 
We first share the life by which things exist and afterwards see 
them as appearances in nature and forget that we have shared 
their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. 
Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom 
and which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. 
We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us 
receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we dis- 
cern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, 
but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, 
if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at 
fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm. Every 
man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind and 



374 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary 
perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err in the expression 
of them, but he knows that these things are so, like day and 
night, not to be disputed. My wilful actions and acquisitions 
are but roving; — the idlest reverie, the faintest native emo- 
tion, command my curiosity and respect. Thoughtless people 
contradict as readily the statement of perceptions as of opin- 
ions, or rather much more readily; for they do not distinguish 
between- perception and notion. They fancy that I choose to 
see this or that thing. But perception is not whimsical, but 
fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see it after me, and in 
course of time all mankind, — although it may chance that no 
one has seen it before me. For my perception of it is as much 
a fact as the sun. 

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that 
it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when 
God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, but 
all things; should fill the world with his voice; should scatter 
forth light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of the present 
thought; and new date and new create the whole. Whenever 
a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass 
away, — means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and 
absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are 
made sacred by relation to it, — one as much as another. All 
things are dissolved to their centre by their cause, and in the 
universal miracle petty and particular miracles disappear. If 
therefore a man claims to know and speak of God and carries 
you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered na- 
tion in another country, in another world, believe him not. 
Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and com- 
pletion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has 
cast his ripened being? Whence then this worship of the past? 
The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority 
of the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors which 
the eye makes, but the soul is light: where it is, is day; where it 
was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury if it 
be anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my 
being and becoming. 

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares 
not say "I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage. 



SELF-RELIANCE 375 

He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. 
These roses under my window make no reference to former 
roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist 
with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply 
the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before 
a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower 
there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature 
is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike. But man 
postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but 
with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches 
that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He 
cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in 
the present, above time. 

This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects 
dare not yet hear God himself unless he speak the phraseology 
of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not 
always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives. We 
are like children who repeat by ro.te the sentences of grandames 
and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and 
character they chance to see, — painfully recollecting the exact 
words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point 
of view which those had who uttered these sayings, they under- 
stand them and are willing to let the words go; for at any time 
they can use words as good when occasion comes. If we live 
truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be 
strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new 
perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its 
hoarded treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, 
his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the 
rustle of the corn. 

And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains 
unsaid; probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far- 
off remembering of the intuition. That thought by what I can 
now nearest approach to say it, is this. When good is near you, 
when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accus- 
tomed way; you shall not discern the footprints of any other; 
you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name; 
— the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and 
new. It shall exclude example and experience. You take the 
way from man, not to man. All persons that ever existed are 



376 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

its forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. 
There is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision there 
is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The 
soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, 
perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself 
with knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature, 
the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea; long intervals of time, years, 
centuries, are of no account. This which I think and feel under- 
lay every former state of life and circumstances, as it does 
underlie my present, and what is called life and what is called 
death. 

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the 
instant of repose ; it resides in the moment of transition from a 
past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting 
to an aim. This one fact the world hates; that the soul becomes ; 
for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty,, 
all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, 
shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. Why then do we prate 
of self-reliance? Inasmuch as the soul is present there will be 
power not confident but agent. To talk of reliance is a poor 
external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies 
because it works and is. Who has more obedience than I mas- 
ters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I 
must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric 
when we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that 
virtue is Height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic 
and permeable to principles, by the law of nature must over- 
power and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who 
are not. 

This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, 
as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed 
One. Self -existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and 
it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it 
enters into all lov/er forms. All things real are so by so much 
virtue as they contain. Commerce, husbandry, hunting, whal- 
ing, war, eloquence, personal weight, are somewhat, and engage 
my respect as examples of its presence and impure action. I 
see the same law working in nature for conservation and 
growth. Power is, in nature, the essential measure of right. 
Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which can- 



SELF-RELIANCE 377 

not help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its 
poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the 
strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, 
are demonstrations of the self-sufficing and therefore self- 
relying soul. 

Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with 
the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of 
men and books and institutions by a simple declaration of the 
divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, 
for God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them, and our 
docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and 
fortune beside our native riches. 

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, 
nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in 
communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to 
beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. We must go alone. 
I like the silent church before the service begins, better than 
any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons 
look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary! So let us 
always sit. Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or 
wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, 
or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood and 
I all men's. Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly, 
even to the extent of being ashamed of it. But your isolation 
must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be eleva- 
tion. At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to 
importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, climate, child, 
sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet 
door and say, — "Come out unto us." But keep thy state; 
come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy 
me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near 
me but through my act. "What we love that we have, but by 
desire we bereave ourselves of the love." 

If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and 
faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into 
the state of war and wake Thor and Woden, courage and con- 
stancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done in our smooth 
times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and 
lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of these de- 
ceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to 



378 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

them, "O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have 
lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I 
am the truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I 
obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants 
but proximities. I shall endeavor to nourish my parents, to 
support my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife, — 
but these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented 
way. I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot 
break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for 
what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still 
seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or 
aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will 
do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices 
me and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you; 
if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical 
attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, 
cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not 
selfishly but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and 
mine, and all men's, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live 
in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love 
what is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and if we fol- 
low the truth it will bring us out safe at last." — But so may 
you give these friends pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty 
and my power, to save their sensibility. Besides, all persons 
have their moments of reason, when they look out into the 
region of absolute truth; then will they justify me and do the 
same thing. 

The populace think that your rejection of popular standards 
is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the 
bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his 
crimes. But the law of consciousness abides. There are two 
confessionals, in one or the other of which we must be shriven. 
You may fulfil your round of duties by clearing yourself in the 
direct or in the reflex way. Consider whether you have satisfied 
your relations to father, mother, cousin, neighbor, town, cat 
and dog — whether any of these can upbraid you. But I may 
also neglect this reflex standard and absolve me to myself. 
I have my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the 
name of duty to many offices that are called duties. But if 
I can discharge its debts it enables me to dispense with the 



SELF-RELIANCE 379 

popular code. If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him 
keep its commandment one day. 

And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast 
off the common motives of humanity and has ventured to 
trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his 
will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, 
society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him 
as strong as iron necessity is to others ! 

If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by 
distinction society, he will see the need of these ethics. The 
sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are be- 
come timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, 
afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our 
age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and 
women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see 
that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own 
wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical 
force and do lean and beg day and night continually. Our 
housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our 
marriages, our religion we have not chosen, but society has 
chosen for us. We are parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged 
battle of fate, where strength is born. 

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises they lose 
all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. 
If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges and is not 
installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or 
suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to 
himself that he is right in being disheartened and in complain- 
ing the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or 
Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, 
farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, 
goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive 
years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred 
of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels 
no shame in not " studying a profession," for he does not post- 
pone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but 
a hundred chances. Let a Stoic open the resources of man and 
tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must de- 
tach themselves; that with the exercise of self -trust, new powers 
shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, born to shed 



3 8o RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

healing to the nations; that he should be ashamed of our com- 
passion, and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the 
laws, the books, idolatries and customs out of the window, we 
pity him no more but thank and revere him; — and that' 
teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor and make his 
name dear to all history. 

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a 
revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their reli- 
gion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of 
living; their association; in their property; in their speculative 
views. 

i. In what prayers do men allow themselves! 1 That which 
they call a holy office is not so much as brave and manly. 
Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come 
through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes 
of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. 
Prayer that craves a particular commodity, anything less than 
all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of 
life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a be- 
holding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing 
his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end 
is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in 
nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with 
God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The 
prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer 
of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers 
heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends. Caratach, 
in Fletcher's Bonduca, when admonished to inquire the mind 
of the god Audate, replies, — 

"His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors; 
Our valors are our best gods." 

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is 
the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calam- 
ities if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your 
own work and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sym- 
pathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly 
and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to 
them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them 
1 In the sense of "justify themselves." 



SELF-RELIANCE 381 

once more in communication with their own reason. The 
secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to 
gods and men is the self -helping man. For him all doors are 
flung wide; him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes 
follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him 
because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically 
caress and celebrate him because he held on his way and scorned 
our disapprobation. The gods love him because men hated 
him. "To the persevering mortal," said Zoroaster, "the 
blessed Immortals are swift." 

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds 
a disease of the intellect. They say with those foolish Israel- 
ites, "Let not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak 
any man with us, and we will obey." 1 Everywhere I am hin- 
dered of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his 
own temple doors and recites fables merely of his brother's, or 
his brother's brother's God. Every new mind is a new classifi- 
cation. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and power, 
a Locke, a Lavoisier, 2 a Hutton, 3 a Bentham, a Fourier, it 
imposes its classification on other men, and lo! a new system! 
In proportion to the depth of the thought, and so to the num- 
ber of the objects it touches and brings within reach of the 
pupil, is his complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in 
creeds and churches, which are also classifications of some 
powerful mind acting on the elemental thought of duty and 
man's relation to the Highest. Such is Calvinism, Quakerism, 
Swedenborgism. The pupil takes the same delight in subordi- 
nating everything to the new terminology as a girl who has 
just learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons 
thereby. It will happen for a time that the pupil will find his 
intellectual power has grown by the study of his master's mind. 
But in all unbalanced minds the classification is idolized, passes 
for the end and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that 
the walls of the system blend to their eye in the remote horizon 
with the walls of the universe; the luminaries of heaven seem 
to them hung on the arch their master built. They cannot 

1 Exodus xx, 19; Deuteronomy v, 25-27. 

2 Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1 743-1 794), the French chemist. 

3 James Hutton (1726-1797), a Scotch geologist, founder of the Plutonian or 
volcanic theory. 



382 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

imagine how you aliens have any right to see, — how you can 
see; "It must be somehow that you stole the light from us." 
They do not yet perceive that light, unsystematic, indomitable, 
will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp 
awhile and call it their own. If they are honest and do well, 
presently their neat new pinfold will be too strait and low, will 
crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal light, 
all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beam 
over the universe as on the first morning. 

2. It is for want of self -culture that the superstition of 
Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its 
fascination for all educated Americans. They who made Eng- 
land, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination, did so by 
sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In 
manly hours we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no 
traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, 
his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into 
foreign lands, he is at home still and shall make men sensible 
by the expression of his countenance that he goes, the mission- 
ary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sover- 
eign and not like an interloper or a valet. 

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the 
globe for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so 
that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with 
the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who 
travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not 
carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth 
among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind 
have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to 
ruins. 

Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover 
to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at 
Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose 
my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark 
on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me 
is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled 
from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxi- 
cated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. 
My giant goes with me wherever I go. 

3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper un- 



SELF-RELIANCE 383 

soundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect 
is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. 
Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. 
We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the 
mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are 
garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our 
faculties lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. The soul 
created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his 
own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an applica- 
tion of his own thought to the thing to be done and the condi- 
tions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the 
Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought and 
quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the Ameri- 
can artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be 
done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the 
day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the govern- 
ment, he will create a house in which all these will find them- 
selves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also. 

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can 
present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole 
life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have 
only an extemporaneous half possession. That which each can 
do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows 
what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is 
the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the 
master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or 
Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique. TheScipion- 
ism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shake- 
speare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. Do that 
which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare 
too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave 
and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of 
the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or Dante, but different 
from all these. Nor possibly will the soul, all rich, all eloquent, 
with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you 
can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to 
them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are 
two organs of one nature. Abide in the simple and noble re- 
gions of thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shall reproduce the 
Foreworld again. 



384 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so 
does our spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the 
improvement of society, and no man improves. 

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it 
gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is bar- 
barous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; 
but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is 
given something is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses 
old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, 
writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill 
of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose 
property is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth 
of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two 
men and you shall see that the white man has lost his abo- 
riginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage 
with a broad-axe and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and 
heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow 
shall send the white to his grave. 

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his 
feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support 
of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill 
to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he 
has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the 
man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice 
he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the 
whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. 
His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his 
wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and 
it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; 
whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a 
Christianity, entrenched in establishments and forms, some 
vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Chris- 
tendom where is the Christian? 

There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the 
standard of height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever 
were. A singular equality may be observed between the great 
men of the first and of the last ages ; nor can all the science, art, 
religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to 
educate greater men than Plutarch's heroes, three or four and 
twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race progressive. 



SELF-RELIANCE 385 

Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but 
they leave no class. He who is really of their class will not be 
called by their name, but will be his own man, and in his turn 
the founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of each period 
are only its costume and do not invigorate men. The harm of 
the improved machinery may compensate its good. Hudson 
and Behring accomplished so much in their fishing-boats as to 
astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted the 
resources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass, dis- 
covered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena than any 
one since. Columbus found the New World in an undecked 
boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of 
means and machinery which were introduced with loud lauda- 
tion a few years or centuries before. The great genius returns 
to essential man. We reckoned the improvements of the art of 
war among the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon con- 
quered Europe by the bivouac, which consisted of falling back 
on naked valor and disencumbering it of all aids. The Emperor 
held it impossible to make a perfect army, says Las Casas, 
"without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries, and 
carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier 
should receive his supply of corn, grind it in his hand-mill and 
bake his bread himself." 

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water 
of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not 
rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. 
The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and 
their experience dies with them. 

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance 
on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. 
Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long 
that they have come to esteem the religious, learned, and civil 
institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults 
on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. 
They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and 
not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed 
of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially 
he hates what he has if he see that it is accidental, — came to 
him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not 
having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him and merely 



386 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

lies there because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But 
that which a man is, does always by necessity acquire; and what 
the man acquires, is living property, which does not wait the 
beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bank- 
ruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man 
breathes. "Thy lot or portion of life," said the Caliph Ali, "is 
seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it." 
Our dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our slavish 
respect for numbers. The political parties meet in numerous 
conventions; the greater the concourse and with each new 
uproar of announcement, The delegation from Essex! The 
Democrats from New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! the 
young patriot feels himself stronger than before by a new thou- 
sand of eyes and arms. In like manner the reformers summon 
conventions and vote and resolve in multitude. Not so, O 
friends! will the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a 
method precisely the reverse. It is only as a man puts off all 
foreign support and stands alone that I see him to be strong 
and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is 
not a man better than a town? Ask nothing of men, and, in 
the endless mutation, thou only firm column must presently 
appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He who knows 
that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for 
good out of him and elsewhere, and, so perceiving, throws him- 
self unhesitatingly on this thought, instantly rights himself, 
stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works mira- 
cles, just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a 
man who stands on his head. 

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, 
and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. 1 But do thou 
leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and 
Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will work and acquire, 
and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shall sit here- 
after out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise 
of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return of your absent 
friend, or some other favorable event raises your spirits, and 
you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. 
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring 
you peace but the triumph of principles. 

1 The wheel was the symbol of Fortuna, goddess of fortune. 



COMPENSATION 387 



COMPENSATION * 

The wings of Time are black and white, 
Pied with morning and with night. 
Mountain tall and ocean deep 
Trembling balance duly keep. 
In changing moon, in tidal wave, 
Glows the feud of Want and Have. 
Gauge of more and less through space 
Electric star and pencil plays. 
The lonely Earth amid the balls 
That hurry through the eternal halls, 
A makeweight flying to the void, 
Supplemental asteroid, 
Or compensatory spark, 
Shoots across the neutral Dark. 

Man's the elm, and Wealth the vine, 
Stanch and strong the tendrils twine: 
Though the frail ringlets thee deceive, 
None from its stock that vine can reave. 
Fear not, then, thou child infirm, 
There's no god dare wrong a worm. 
Laurel crowns cleave to deserts 
And power to him who power exerts; 
Hast not thy share? On winged feet, 
Lo! it rushes thee to meet; 
And all that Nature made thy own, 
Floating in air or pent in stone, 
Will rive the hills and swim the sea 
And, like thy shadow, follow thee. 

Ever since I was a boy I have wished to write a discourse on 
Compensation; for it seemed to me when very young that on 
this subject life was ahead of theology and the people knew 
more than the preachers taught. The documents too from 
which the doctrine is to be drawn, charmed my fancy by their 
endless variety, and lay always before me, even in sleep; for 
they are the tools in our hands, the bread in our basket, the 
transactions of the street, the farm and the dwelling-house; 
greetings, relations, debts and credits, the influence of charac- 
ter, the nature and endowment of all men. It seemed to me 
also that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity, the present 
action of the soul of this world, clean from all vestige of tradi- 
tion; and so the heart of man might be bathed by an inundation 
of eternal love, conversing with that which he knows was al- 
ways and always must be, because it really is now. It appeared 
moreover that if this doctrine could be stated in terms with any 
resemblance to those bright intuitions in which this truth is 
sometimes revealed to us, it would be a star in many dark 

1 Essays, First Series. 



388 RALPH WALDO EMERSON . 

hours and crooked passages in our journey, that would not 
suffer us to lose our way. 

I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing a sermon at 
church. The preacher, a man esteemed for his orthodoxy, un- 
folded in the ordinary manner the doctrine of the Last Judg- 
ment. He assumed that judgment is not executed in this 
world; that the wicked are successful; that the good are miser- 
able; and then urged from reason and from Scripture a compen- 
sation to be made to both parties in the next life. No offence 
appeared to be taken by the congregation at this doctrine. 
As far as I could observe when the meeting broke up they 
separated without remark on the sermon. 

Yet what was the import of this teaching? What did the 
preacher mean by saying that the good are miserable in the 
present life? Was it that houses and lands, offices, wine, horses, 
dress, luxury, are had by unprincipled men, whilst the saints 
are poor and despised ; and that a compensation is to be made 
to these last hereafter, by giving them the like gratifications 
another day, — bank-stock and doubloons, venison and cham- 
pagne? This must be the compensation intended; for what 
else? Is it that they are to have leave to pray and praise? to 
love and serve men? Why, that they can do now. The legiti- 
mate inference the disciple would draw was, — "We are to have 
such a good time as the sinners have now "; — or, to push it to 
its extreme import, — "You sin now, we shall sin by and by; 
we would sin now, if we could; not being successful we expect 
our revenge to-morrow." 

The fallacy lay in the immense concession that the bad are 
successful; that justice is not done now. The blindness of the 
preacher consisted in deferring to the base estimate of the mar- 
ket of what constitutes a manly success, instead of confronting 
and convicting the world from the truth ; announcing the pres- 
ence of the soul; the omnipotence of the will; and so establishing 
the standard of good and ill, of success and falsehood. 

I find a similar base tone in the popular religious works of 
the day and the same doctrines assumed by the literary men 
when occasionally they treat the related topics. I think that 
our popular theology has gained in decorum, and not in prin- 
ciple, over the superstitions it has displaced. But men are bet- 
ter than their theology. Their daily life gives it the lie. Every 



COMPENSATION 389 

ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves the doctrine behind him in 
his own experience, and all men feel sometimes the falsehood 
which they cannot demonstrate. For men are wiser than they 
know. That which they hear in schools and pulpits without 
afterthought, if said in conversation would probably be ques- 
tioned in silence. If a man dogmatize in a mixed company 
on Providence and the divine laws, he is answered by a silence 
which conveys well enough to an observer the dissatisfaction of 
the hearer, but his incapacity to make his own statement. 

I shall attempt in this and the following chapter l to record 
some facts that indicate the path of the law of Compensation ; 
happy beyond my expectation if I shall truly draw the smallest 
arc of this circle. 

Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of na- 
ture; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and 
flow of waters ; in male and female ; in the inspiration and expi- 
ration of plants and animals; in the equation of quantity and 
quality in the fluids of the animal body; in the systole and dias- 
tole of the heart; in the undulations of fluids and of sound; in 
the centrifugal and centripetal gravity; in electricity, galva- 
nism, and chemical affinity. Superinduce magnetism at one end 
of a needle, the opposite magnetism takes place at the other 
end. If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty here, 
you must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects na- 
ture, so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing 
to make it whole; as, spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; 
subjective, objective; in, out; upper, under; motion, rest; yea, 
nay. 

Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. 
The entire system of things gets represented in every particle. 
There is somewhat that resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, 
day and night, man and woman, in a single needle of the pine, 
in a kernel of corn, in each individual of every animal tribe. 
The reaction, so grand in the elements, is repeated within these 
small boundaries. For example, in the animal kingdom the 
physiologist has observed that no creatures are favorites, but 
a certain compensation balances every gift and every defect. 
A surplusage given to one part is paid out of a reduction from 

x "Spiritual Laws." 



390 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

another part of the same creature. If the head and neck are 
enlarged, the trunk and extremities are cut short. 

The theory of the mechanic forces is another example. What 
we gain in power is lost in time, and the converse. The periodic 
or compensating errors of the planets is another instance. The 
influences of climate and soil in political history is another. 
The cold climate invigorates. The barren soil does not breed 
fevers, crocodiles, tigers, or scorpions. 

The same dualism underlies the nature and condition of man. 
Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every 
sweet hath its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is 
a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. 
It is to answer for its moderation with its life. For every grain 
of wit there is a grain of folly. For everything you have missed, 
you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, 
you lose something. If riches increase, they are increased that 
use them. If the gatherer gathers too much, Nature takes out 
of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the estate, but 
kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and exceptions. The 
waves of the sea do not more speedily seek a level from their 
loftiest tossing than the varieties of condition tend to equalize 
themselves. There is always some levelling circumstance that 
puts down the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate, 
substantially on the same ground with all others. Is a man too 
strong and fierce for society and by temper and position a bad 
citizen, — a morose ruffian, with a dash of the pirate in him? — 
Nature sends him a troop of pretty sons and daughters who are 
getting along in the dame's classes at the village school, and love 
and fear for them smooths his grim scowl to courtesy. Thus she 
contrives to intenerate the granite and felspar, takes the boar 
out and puts the lamb in and keeps her balance true. 

The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But 
the President has paid dear for his White House. It has com- 
monly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attri- 
butes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appear- 
ance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real 
masters who stand erect behind the throne. Or do men desire 
the more substantial and permanent grandeur of genius? 
Neither has this an immunity. He who by force of will or of 
thought is great and overlooks thousands, has the charges of 



COMPENSATION 391 

that eminence. With every influx of light comes new danger. 
Has he light? he must bear witness to the light, and always 
outrun that sympathy which gives him such keen satisfaction, 
by his fidelity to new revelations of the incessant soul. He 
must hate father and mother, wife and child. Has he all that 
the world loves and admires and covets? — he must cast be- 
hind him their admiration and afflict them by faithfulness 
to his truth and become a byword and a hissing. 

This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain 
to build or plot or combine against it. Things refuse to be mis- 
managed long. Res nolunt diu male administrari. 1 Though no 
checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist, and will appear. 
If the government is cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If you 
tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing. If you make the 
criminal code sanguinary, juries will not convict. If the law is 
too mild, private vengeance comes in. If the government is a 
terrific democracy, the pressure is resisted by an over-charge of 
energy in the citizen, and life glows with a fiercer flame. The 
true life and satisfactions of man seem to elude the utmost 
rigors or felicities of condition and to establish themselves with 
great indifferency under all varieties of circumstances. Under 
all governments the influence of character remains the same, — 
in Turkey and in New England about alike. Under the prime- 
val despots of Egypt, history honestly confesses that man must 
have been as free as culture could make him. 

These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is 
represented in every one of its particles. Everything in nature 
contains all the powers of nature. Everything is made of one 
hidden stuff ; as the naturalist sees one type under every meta- 
morphosis, and regards a horse as a running man, a fish as a 
swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a tree as a rooted man. 
Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, 
but part for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hin- 
drances, energies, and whole system of every other. Every 
occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world 
and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem 
of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its 
course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate 
the whole man and recite all his destiny. 

1 Translated in the previous sentence. 



392 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The microscope 
cannot find the animalcule which is less perfect for being little. 
Eyes, ears, taste, smell, motion, resistance, appetite, and organs 
of reproduction that take hold on eternity, — all find room to 
consist in the small creature. So do we put our life into every 
act. The true doctrine of omnipresence is that God reappears 
with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. The value of the 
universe contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good 
is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, 
so the limitation. 

Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul 
which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel 
its inspiration; but there in history we can see its fatal strength. 
"It is in the world, and the world was made by it." Justice is 
not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts 
of life. 'Aet yap ev ttvktovctiv ol Ato? /cvfioi, 1 — The dice of 
God are always loaded. The world looks like a multiplication- 
table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, 
balances itself. Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor 
more nor less, still returns to you. Every secret is told, every 
crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong re- 
dressed, in silence and certainty. What we call retribution is 
the universal necessity by which the whole appears wherever 
a part appears. If you see smoke, there must be fire. If you 
see a hand or a limb, you know that the trunk to which it 
belongs is there behind. 

Every act rewards itself, or in other words integrates itself, 
in a twofold manner; first in the thing, or in real nature; and 
secondly in the circumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call 
the circumstance the retribution. The causal retribution is in 
the thing and is seen by the soul. The retribution in the circum- 
stance is seen by the understanding; it is inseparable from the 
thing, but is often spread over a long time and so does not be- 
come distinct until after many years. The specific stripes may 
follow late after the offence, but they follow because they ac- 
company it. Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. 
Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower 
of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and 
ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already 
1 Sophocles, a "Fragment" from a lost drama; translated in the next phrase. 



COMPENSATION 393 

blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit 
in the seed. 

Whilst thus the world will be whole and refuses to be dis- 
parted, we seek to act partially, to sunder, to appropriate; for 
example, — to gratify the senses we sever the pleasure of the 
senses from the needs of the character. The ingenuity of man 
has always been dedicated to the solution of one problem, — 
how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensual 
bright, etc., from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral 
fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean off this upper 
surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a one end, 
without an other end. The soul says, "Eat"; the body would 
feast. The soul says, "The man and woman shall be one 
flesh and one soul"; the body would join the flesh only. 
The soul says, "Have dominion over all things to the ends 
of virtue"; the body would have the power over things to its 
own ends. 

The soul strives amain to live and work through all things. 
It would be the only fact. All things shall be added unto it, — 
power, pleasure, knowledge, beauty. The particular man aims 
to be somebody; to set up for himself; to truck and higgle for a 
private good; and, in particulars, to ride that he may ride; to 
dress that he may be dressed; to eat that he may eat; and to 
govern, that he may be seen. Men seek to be great; they would 
have offices, wealth, power, and fame. They think that to be 
great is to possess one side of nature, — the sweet, without the 
other side, the bitter. 

This dividing and detaching is steadily counteracted. Up to 
this day it must be owned no projector has had the smallest 
success. The parted water reunites behind our hand. Pleas- 
ure is taken out of pleasant things, profit out of profitable 
things, power out of strong things, as soon as we seek to sepa- 
rate them from the whole. We can no more halve things and get 
the sensual good, by itself, than we can get an inside that shall 
have no outside, or a light without a shadow. "Drive out 
Nature with a fork, she comes running back." 

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the un- 
wise seek to dodge, which one and another brags that he does 
not know, that they do not touch him; — but the brag is on his 
lips, the conditions are in his soul. If he escapes them in one 



394 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

part they attack him in another more vital part. If he has es- 
caped them in form and in the appearance, it is because he has 
resisted his life and fled from himself, and the retribution is so 
much death. So signal is the failure of all attempts to make 
this separation of the good from the tax, that the experiment 
would not be tried, — since to try it is to be mad, — but for the 
circumstance that when the disease begins in the will, of rebel- 
lion and separation, the intellect is at once infected, so that the 
man ceases to see God whole in each object, but is able to see 
the sensual allurement of an object and not see the sensual 
hurt; he sees the mermaid's head but not the dragon's tail, and 
thinks he can cut off that which he would have from that which 
he would not have. "How secret art thou who dwellest in the 
highest heavens in silence, O thou only great God, sprinkling 
with an unwearied providence certain penal blindnesses upon 
such as have unbridled desires!" 

The human soul is true to these facts in the painting of 
fable, of history, of law, of proverbs, of conversation. It finds 
a tongue in literature unawares. Thus the Greeks called Jupi- 
ter, Supreme Mind; but having traditionally ascribed to him 
many base actions, they involuntarily made amends to reason 
by tying up the hands of so bad a god. He is made as helpless 
as a king of England. Prometheus knows one secret which 
Jove must bargain for; Minerva, another. He cannot get his 
own thunders; Minerva keeps the key of them: — 

"Of all the gods, I only know the keys 
That ope the solid doors within whose vaults 
His thunders sleep." 

, A plain confession of the in-working of the All and of its moral 
aim. The Indian mythology ends in the same ethics; and it 
would seem impossible for any fable to be invented and get any 
currency which was not moral. Aurora forgot to ask youth for 
her lover, and though Tithonus is immortal, he is old. Achilles 
is not quite invulnerable; the sacred waters did not wash the 
heel by which Thetis held him. Siegfried, in the Nibelungen, 
is not quite immortal, for a leaf fell on his back whilst he was 
bathing in the dragon's blood, and that spot which it covered 
is mortal. And so it must be. There is a crack in everything 
God has made. It would seem there is always this vindictive 
circumstance stealing in at unawares even into the wild poesy t 



COMPENSATION 395 

in which the human fancy attempted to make bold holiday 
and to shake itself free of the old laws, — this back-stroke, 
this kick of the gun, certifying that the law is fatal; that in 
nature nothing can be given, all things are sold. 

This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who keeps watch 
in the universe and lets no offence go unchastized. The Furies, 
they said, are attendants on justice, and if the sun in heaven 
should transgress his path they would punish him. The poets 
related that stone walls and iron swords and leathern thongs 
had an occult sympathy with the wrongs of their owners; that 
the belt which Ajax gave Hector dragged the Trojan hero over 
the field at the wheels of the car of Achilles, and the sword 
which Hector gave Ajax was that on whose point Ajax fell. 
They recorded that when the Thasians erected a statue to 
Theagenes, a victor in the games, one of his rivals went to it by 
night and endeavored to throw it down by repeated blows, until 
at last he moved it from its pedestal and was crushed to death 
beneath its fall. 

This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It came from 
thought above the will of the writer. That is the best part of 
each writer which has nothing private in it; that which he does 
not know; that which flowed out of his constitution and not 
from his too active invention; that which in the study of a single 
artist you might not easily find, but in the study of many you 
would abstract as the spirit of them all. Phidias it is not, but 
the work of man in that early Hellenic world that I would 
know. The name and circumstance of Phidias, however con- 
venient for history, embarrass when we come to the highest 
criticism. We are to see that which man was tending to do in 
a given period, and was hindered, or, if you will, modified in 
doing, by the interfering volitions of Phidias, of Dante, of 
Shakespeare, the organ whereby man at the moment wrought. 

Still more striking is the expression of this fact in the prov- 
erbs of all nations, which are always the literature of reason, 
or the statements of an absolute truth without qualification. 
Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctu- 
ary of the intuitions. That which the droning world, chained 
to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own 
words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradic- 
tion. And his law of laws, which the pulpit, the senate, and the 



396 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

college deny, is hourly preached in all markets and workshops 
by flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as true and as omni- 
present as that of birds and flies. 

All things are double, one against another. — Tit for tat; 
an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth; blood for blood; measure 
for measure; love for love. — Give, and it shall be given you. — 
He that watereth shall be watered himself. — What will you 
have? quoth God; pay for it and take it. — Nothing venture, 
nothing have. — Thou shalt be paid exactly for what thou hast 
done, no more, no less. — Who doth not work shall not eat. — 
Harm watch, harm catch. — .Curses always recoil on the head 
of him who imprecates them. — If you put a chain around the 
neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own. — 
Bad counsel confounds the adviser. — The Devil is an ass. 

It is thus written, because it is thus in life. Our action is 
overmastered and characterized above our will by the law of 
nature. We aim at a petty end quite aside from the public 
good, but our act arranges itself by irresistible magnetism in a 
line with the poles of the world. 

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or 
against his will he draws his portrait to the eye of his compan- 
ions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. 
It is a thread-ball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains 
in the thrower's bag. Or rather it is a harpoon hurled at the 
whale, unwinding, as it flies, a coil of cord in the boat, and, if 
the harpoon is not good, or not well thrown, it will go nigh to 
cut the steersman in twain or to sink the boat. 

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. "No man 
had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him," said 
Burke. The exclusive in fashionable life does not see that he 
excludes himself from enjoyment, in the attempt to appropri- 
ate it. The exclusionist in religion does not see that he shuts 
the door of heaven on himself, in striving to shut out others. 
Treat men as pawns and ninepins and you shall suffer as well 
as they. If you leave out their heart, you shall lose your own. 
The senses would make things of all persons; of women, of 
children, of the poor. The vulgar proverb, "I will get it from 
his purse or get it from his skin," is sound philosophy. 

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are 
speedily punished. They are punished by fear. Whilst I stand 



COMPENSATION 397 

in simple relations to my fellowman, I have no displeasure in 
meeting him. We meet as water meets water, or as two cur- 
rents of air mix, with perfect diffusion and interpenetration of 
nature. But as soon as there is any departure from simplicity 
and attempt at halfness, or good for me that is not good for 
him, my neighbor feels the wrong; he shrinks from me as far as 
I have shrunk from him; his eyes no longer seek mine; there is 
war between us; there is hate in him and fear in me. 

All the old abuses in society, universal and particular, all 
unjust accumulations of property and power, are avenged in 
the same manner. Fear is an instructor of great sagacity and 
the herald of all revolutions. One thing he teaches, that there 
is rottenness where he appears. He is a carrion crow, and 
though you see not well what he hovers for, there is death 
somewhere. Our property is timid, our laws are timid, our cul- 
tivated classes are timid. Fear for ages has boded and mowed 
and gibbered over government and property. That obscene 
bird is not there for nothing. He indicates great wrongs which 
must be revised. 

Of the like nature is that expectation of change which in- 
stantly follows the suspension of our voluntary activity. The 
terror of cloudless noon, the emerald of Poly crates, 1 the awe 
of prosperity, the instinct which leads every generous soul to 
impose on itself tasks of a noble asceticism and vicarious virtue, 
are the tremblings of the balance of justice through the heart 
and mind of man. 

Experienced men of the world know very well that it is best 
to pay scot and lot as they go along, and that a man often pays 
dear for a small frugality. The borrower runs in his own debt. 
Has a man gained anything who has received a hundred favors 
and rendered none? Has he gained by borrowing, through indo- 
lence or cunning, his neighbor's wares, or horses, or money? 
There arises on the deed the instant acknowledgment of bene- 
fit on the one part and of debt on the other; that is, of superi- 
ority and inferiority. The transaction remains in the memory 
of himself and his neighbor; and every new transaction alters 
according to its nature their relation to each other. He may 

1 Polycrates, fearing the fate that befalls him who enjoys continuous pros- 
perity, sacrifices the object that he values above all else, — his emerald ring. 
Disaster nevertheless overtakes him. 



398 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

soon come to see that he had better have broken his own bones 
than to have ridden in his neighbor's coach, and that "the 
highest price he can pay for a thing is to ask for it." x 

A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of life, and 
know that it is the part of prudence to face every claimant and 
pay every just demand on your time, your talents, or your 
heart. Always pay; for first or last you must pay your entire 
debt. Persons and events may stand for a time between you 
and justice, but it is only a postponement. You must pay at 
last your own debt. If you are wise you will dread a prosperity 
which only loads you with more. Benefit is the end of nature. 
But for every benefit which you receive, a tax is levied. He is 
great who confers the most benefits. He is base, — and that is 
the one base thing in the universe, — to receive favors and 
render none. In the order of nature we cannot render benefits 
to those from whom we receive them, or only seldom. But the 
benefit we receive must be rendered again, line for fine, deed 
for deed, cent for cent, to somebody. Beware of too much good 
staying in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm 2 worms. 
Pay it away quickly in some sort. 

Labor is watched over by the same pitiless laws. Cheapest, 
say the prudent, is the dearest labor. What we buy in a broom, 
a mat, a wagon, a knife, is some application of good sense to a 
common want. It is best to pay in your land a skilful gardener, 
or to buy good sense applied to gardening; in your sailor, good 
sense applied to navigation; in the house, good sense applied 
to cooking, sewing, serving; in your agent, good sense applied 
to accounts and affairs. So do you multiply your presence, or 
spread yourself throughout your estate. But because of the 
dual constitution of things, in labor as in life there can be no 
cheating. The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles 
himself. For the real price of labor is knowledge and virtue, 
whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like paper 
money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they 
represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counter- 
feited or stolen. These ends of labor cannot be answered but 
by real exertions of the mind, and in obedience to pure mo- 
tives. The cheat, the defaulter, the gambler, cannot extort the 

1 "This maxim," according to Mr. Edward Emerson, "was a household word 
with Mr. Emerson." 2 Breed; cf. Exodus xvr, 20. 



COMPENSATION 399 

knowledge of material and moral nature which his honest care 
and pains yield to the operative. The law of nature is, Do the 
thing, and you shall have the power; but they who do not the 
thing have not the power. 

Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening of 
a stake to the construction of a city or an epic, is one immense 
illustration of the perfect compensation of the universe. The 
absolute balance of Give and Take, the doctrine that every- 
thing has its price, — and if that price is not paid, not that 
thing but something else is obtained, and that it is impossible 
to get anything without its price, — is not less sublime in the 
columns of a leger x than in the budgets of states, in the laws of 
light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of nature. I 
cannot doubt that the high laws which each man sees implicated 
in those processes with which he is conversant, the stern ethics 
which sparkle on his chisel-edge, which are measured out by his 
plumb and foot-rule, which stand as manifest in the footing of 
the shop-bill as in the history of a state, — do recommend to 
him his trade, and though seldom named, exalt his business to 
his imagination. 

The league between virtue and nature engages all things 
to assume a hostile front to vice. The beautiful laws and sub- 
stances of the world persecute and whip the traitor. He finds 
that things are arranged for truth and benefit, but there is no 
den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and 
the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a 
coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods 
the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole. 
You cannot recall the spoken word, you cannot wipe out the 
foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no 
inlet or clew. Some damning circumstance always transpires. 
The laws and substances of nature — water, snow, wind, 
gravitation — become penalties to the thief. 

On the other hand the law holds with equal sureness for all 
right action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathe- 
matically just,' as much as the two sides of an algebraic equa- 
tion. The good man has absolute good, which like fire turns 
everything to its own nature, so that you cannot do him any 
harm; but as the royal armies sent against Napoleon, when he 

1 Old form of "ledger." 



4 oo RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

approached cast down their colors and from enemies became 
friends, so disasters of all kinds, as sickness, offence, poverty, 
prove benefactors : — 

"Winds blow and waters roll 
Strength to the brave and power and deity, 
Yet in themselves are nothing." 

The good are befriended even by weakness and defect. As 
no man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him, 
so no man had ever a defect that was not somewhere made 
useful to him. The stag in the fable admired his horns and 
blamed his feet, but when the hunter came, his feet saved him, 
and afterwards, caught in the thicket, his horns destroyed him. 
Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults. As no man 
thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against 
it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with the hindrances 
or talents of men until he has suffered from the one and seen 
the triumph of the other over his own want of the same. Has 
he a defect of temper that unfits him to live in society? Thereby 
he is driven to entertain himself alone and acquire habits of 
self-help; and thus, like the wounded oyster, he mends his shell 
with pearl. 

Our strength grows out of our weakness. The indignation 
which arms itself with secret forces does not awaken until we 
are pricked and stung and sorely assailed. A great man is 
always willing to be little. Whilst he sits on the cushion of 
advantages, he goes to sleep. When he is pushed, tormented, 
defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he has been put 
on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts; learns his 
ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got modera- 
tion and real skill. The wise man throws himself on the side of 
his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his 
weak point. The wound cicatrizes and falls off from him like a 
dead skin, and when they would triumph, lo ! he has passed on 
invulnerable. Blame is safer than praise. I hate to be defended 
in a newspaper. As long as all that is said is said against me, I 
feel a certain assurance of success. But as soon as honeyed 
words of praise are spoken for me I feel as one that lies unpro- 
tected before his enemies. In general, every evil to which we 
do not succumb is a benefactor. As the Sandwich Islander 
believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes 



COMPENSATION 401 

into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we 
resist. 

The same guards which protect us from disaster, defect, and 
enmity, defend us, if we will, from selfishness and fraud. Bolts 
and bars are not the best of our institutions, nor is shrewdness 
in trade a mark of wisdom. Men suffer all their life long under 
the foolish superstition that they can be cheated. But it is as 
impossible for a man to be cheated by any one but himself, as 
for a thing to be and not to be at the same time. There is a 
third silent party to all our bargains. The nature and soul of 
things takes on itself the guaranty of the fulfilment of every 
contract, so that honest service cannot come to loss. If you 
serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put God 
in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer the 
payment is withholden, the better for you; for compound 
interest on compound interest is the rate and usage of this 
exchequer. 

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat 
nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. It 
makes no difference whether the actors be many or one, a 
tyrant or a mob. A mob is a society of bodies voluntarily 
bereaving themselves of reason and traversing 1 its work. The 
mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. 
Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are insane, like its 
whole constitution. It persecutes a principle; it would whip a 
right; it would tar and feather justice, by inflicting fire and 
outrage upon the houses and persons of those who have these. 
It resembles the prank of boys, who run with fire-engines to 
put out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars. The inviolate 
spirit turns their spite against the wrongdoers. The martyr 
cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; 
every prison a more illustrious abode; every burned book or 
house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged 
word reverberates through the earth from side to side. Hours 
of sanity and consideration are always arriving to communities, 
as to individuals, when the truth is seen and the martyrs are 
justified. 

Thus do all things preach the indiflerency of circumstances. 
The man is all. Everything has two sides, a good and an evil. 

1 Denying. 



402 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Every advantage has its tax. I learn to be content. But the 
doctrine of compensation is not the doctrine of indifferency. 
The thoughtless say, on hearing these representations, — What 
boots it to do well? there is one event to good and evil; if I gain 
any good I must pay for it; if I lose any good I gain some other; 
all actions are indifferent. 

There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, 
its own nature. The soul is not a compensation, but a life. The 
soul is. Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose 
waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal 
abyss of real Being. Essence, or God, is not a relation or a part, 
but the whole. Being is the vast affirmative, excluding nega- 
tion, self-balanced, and swallowing up all relations, parts, and 
times within itself. Nature, truth, virtue, are the influx from 
thence. Vice is the absence or departure of the same. Nothing, 
Falsehood, may indeed stand as the great Night or shade on 
which as a background the living universe paints itself forth, 
but no fact is begotten by it; it cannot work, for it is not. It 
cannot work any good; it cannot work any harm. It is harm 
inasmuch as it is worse not to be than to be. 

We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil acts, because 
the criminal adheres to his vice and contumacy and does 
not come to a crisis or judgment anywhere in visible nature. 
There is no stunning confutation of his nonsense before men 
and angels. Has he therefore outwitted the law? Inasmuch 
as he carries the malignity and the lie with him he so far 
deceases from nature. In some manner there will be a demon- 
stration of the wrong to the understanding also; but, should 
we not see it, this deadly deduction makes square the eternal 
account. 

Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain of 
rectitude must be bought by any loss. There is no penalty to 
virtue; no penalty to wisdom; they are proper additions of 
being. In a virtuous action I properly am; in a virtuous act I 
add to the world; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos 
and Nothing and see the darkness receding on the limits of the 
horizon. There can be no excess to love, none to knowledge, 
none to beauty, when these attributes are considered in the 
purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and always affirms an 
Optimism, never a Pessimism. 



COMPENSATION 403 

His life is a progress, and not a station. His instinct is trust. 
Our instinct uses "more" and "less" in application to man, 
of the presence of the soul, and not of its absence ; the brave man 
is greater than the coward; the true, the benevolent, the wise, 
is more a man and not less, than the fool and knave. There 
is no tax on the good of virtue, for that is the incoming of 
God himself, or absolute existence, without any comparative. 
Material good has its tax, and if it came without desert or 
sweat, has no root in me, and the next wind will blow it away. 
But all the good of nature is the soul's, and may be had if paid 
for in nature's lawful coin, that is, by labor which the heart 
and the head allow. I no longer wish to meet a good I do not 
earn, for example to find a pot of buried gold, knowing that it 
brings with it new burdens. I do not wish more external goods, 
— neither possessions, nor honors, nor powers, nor persons. 
The gain is apparent; the tax is certain. But there is no tax on 
the knowledge that the compensation exists and that it is not 
desirable to dig up treasure. Herein I rejoice with a serene 
eternal peace. I contract the boundaries of possible mischief. 
I learn the wisdom of St. Bernard, "Nothing can work me 
damage except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about 
with me, and never am a real sufferer but by my own 
fault." 

In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the inequali- 
ties of condition. The radical tragedy of nature seems to be 
the distinction of More and Less. How can Less not feel the 
pain ; how not feel indignation or malevolence towards More? 
Look at those who have less faculty, and one feels sad and 
knows not well what to make of it. He almost shuns their eye; 
he fears they will upbraid God. What should they do? It seems 
a great injustice. But see the facts nearly and these mountain- 
ous inequalities vanish. Love reduces them as the sun melts 
the iceberg in the sea. The heart and soul of all men being one, 
this bitterness of His and Mine ceases. His is mine. I am my 
brother and my brother is me. If I feel overshadowed and out- 
done by great neighbors, I can yet love; I can still receive; and 
he that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves. Thereby 
I make the discovery that my brother is my guardian, acting 
for me with the friendliest designs, and the estate I so admired 
and envied is my own. It is the nature of the soul to appropri- 



4 o 4 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

ate all things. Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, 
and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own con- 
scious domain. His virtue, — is not that mine? His wit, — if it 
cannot be made mine, it is not wit. 

Such also is the natural history of calamity. The changes 
which break up at short intervals the prosperity of men are 
advertisements of a nature whose law is growth. Every soul is 
by this intrinsic necessity quitting its whole system of things, 
its friends and home and laws and faith, as the shell-fish crawls 
out of its beautiful but stony case, because it no longer admits 
of its growth, and slowly forms a new house. In proportion to 
the vigor of the individual these revolutions are frequent, until 
in some happier mind they are incessant and all worldly rela- 
tions hang very loosely about him, becoming as it were a trans- 
parent fluid membrane through which the living form is seen, 
and not, as in most men, an indurated heterogeneous fabric of 
many dates and of no settled character, in which the man is 
imprisoned. Then there can be enlargement, and the man of 
to-day scarcely recognizes the man of yesterday. And such 
should be the outward biography of man in time, a putting off 
of dead circumstances day by day, as he renews his raiment 
day by day. But to us, in our lapsed estate, resting, not ad- 
vancing, resisting, not cooperating with the divine expansion, 
this growth comes by shocks. 

We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels 
go. We do not see that they only go out that archangels may 
come in. We are idolaters of the old. We do not believe in the 
riches of the soul, in its proper eternity and omnipresence. We 
do not believe there is any force in to-day to rival or recreate 
that beautiful yesterday. We linger in the ruins of the old tent 
where once we had bread and shelter and organs, nor believe 
that the spirit can feed, cover, and nerve us again. We cannot 
again find aught so dear, so sweet, so graceful. But we sit and 
weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty saith, "Up and on- 
ward forevermore!" We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither 
will we rely on the new; and so we walk ever with reverted 
eyes, like those monsters who look backwards. 

And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent 
to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, 
a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of 



LOVE 405 

friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But 
the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all 
facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which 
seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the 
aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolu- 
tions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of 
youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted 
occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the 
formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. 
It permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances 
and the reception of new influences that prove of the first 
importance to the next years; and the man or woman who would 
have remained a sunny garden-flower, with no room for its 
roots and too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the 
walls and the neglect of the gardener is made the banian of the 
forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide neighborhoods of men. 

LOVE 1 

"I was as a gem concealed; 
Me my burning ray revealed." 2 

Koran. 

Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfilments; each 
of its joys ripens into a new want. Nature, uncontainable, 
flowing, forelooking, in the first sentiment of kindness antici- 
pates already a benevolence which shall lose all particular 
regards in its general light. The introduction to this felicity is 
in a private and tender relation of one to one, which is the 
enchantment of human life; which, like a certain divine rage 
and enthusiasm, seizes on a man at one period, and works a 
revolution in his mind and body; unites him to his race, pledges 
him to the domestic and civic relations, carries him with new 
sympathy into nature, enhances the power of the senses, opens 
the imagination, adds to his character heroic and sacred attri- 
butes, establishes marriage, and gives permanence to human 
society. 

The natural association of the sentiment of love with the 
heyday of the blood seems to require, that in order to portray 

1 Essays, First Series. 

2 Emerson's note-book version reads: "I was as a treasure concealed: then I 
loved that I might be known." 



4 o6 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

it in vivid tints, which every youth and maid should confess to 
be true to their throbbing experience, one must not be too old. 
The delicious fancies of youth reject the least savor of a mature 
philosophy, as chilling with age and pedantry their purple 
bloom. And, therefore, I know I incur the imputation of un- 
necessary hardness and stoicism from those who compose the 
Court and Parliament of Love. But from these formidable 
censors I shall appeal to my seniors. For it is to be considered 
that this passion of which we speak, though it begin with the 
young, yet forsakes not the old, or rather suffers no one who is 
truly its servant to grow old, but makes the aged participators 
of it, not less than the tender maiden, though in a different and 
nobler sort. For it is a fire that, kindling its first embers in the 
narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering 
spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it 
warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon 
the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and 
all nature with its generous flames. It matters not, therefore, 
whether we attempt to describe the passion at twenty, at thirty, 
or at eighty years. He who paints it at the first period will lose 
some of its later, he who paints it at the last, some of its 
earlier traits. Only it is to be hoped that, by patience and 
the Muses' aid, we may attain to that inward view of the law, 
which shall describe a truth ever young and beautiful, so cen- 
tral that it shall commend itself to the eye, at whatever angle 
beholden. 

And the first condition is, that we must leave a too close and 
lingering adherence to facts, and study the sentiment as it 
appeared in hope and not in history. For each man sees his 
own life defaced and disfigured, as the life of man is not, to his 
imagination. Each man sees over his own experience a certain 
stain of error, whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal. 
Let any man go back to those delicious relations which make 
the beauty of his life, which have given him sincerest instruc- 
tion and nourishment, he will shrink and moan. Alas ! I know 
not why, but infinite compunctions embitter in mature life the 
remembrances of budding joy, and cover every beloved name. 
Everything is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or 
as truth. But all is sour, if seen as experience. Details are 
melancholy; the plan is seemly and noble. In the actual world 



LOVE 407 

— the painful kingdom of time and place — dwell care, and 
canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal 
hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the Muses sing. But grief 
cleaves to names, and persons, and the partial interests of 
to-day and yesterday. 

The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion which this 
topic of personal relations usurps in the conversation of society. 
What do we wish to know of any worthy person so much, as 
how he has sped in the history of this sentiment? What books 
in the circulating libraries circulate? How we glow over these 
novels of passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth 
and nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of 
life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? 
Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall meet them 
again. But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep 
emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them, 
and take the warmest interest in the development of the ro- 
mance. All mankind love a lover. The earliest demonstrations 
of complacency and kindness are nature's most winning pic- 
tures. It is the dawn of civility and grace in the coarse and 
rustic. The rude village boy teases the girls about the school- 
house door; but to-day he comes running into the entry, and 
meets one fair child disposing her satchel; he holds her books 
to help her, and instantly it seems to him as if she removed 
herself from him infinitely, and was a sacred precinct. Among 
the throng of girls he runs rudely enough, but one alone dis- 
tances him; and these two little neighbors, that were so close 
just now, have learned to respect each other's personality. Or 
who can avert his eyes from the engaging, half-artful, half- 
artless ways of school-girls who go into the country shops to 
buy a skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and talk half an hour 
about nothing with the broad-faced, good-natured shop-boy. 
In the village they are on a perfect equality, which love delights 
in, and without any coquetry the happy, affectionate nature of 
woman flows out in this pretty gossip. The girls may have little 
beauty, yet plainly do they establish between them and the 
good boy the most agreeable, confiding relations, what with 
their fun and their earnest, about Edgar, and Jonas, and Almira, 
and who was invited to the party, and who danced at the 
dancing-school, and when the singing-school would begin, and 



408 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

other nothings concerning which the parties cooed. By and by 
that boy wants a wife, and very truly and heartily will he know 
where to find a sincere and sweet mate, without any risk such 
as Milton deplores as incident to scholars and great men. 

I have been told, that in some public discourses of mine my 
reverence for the intellect has made me unjustly cold to the 
personal relations. But now I almost shrink at the remem- 
brance of such disparaging words. For persons are love's world, 
and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the 
young soul wandering here in nature to the power of love, with- 
out being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught 
derogatory to the social instincts. For, though the celestial 
rapture falling out of heaven seizes only upon those of tender 
age, and although a beauty overpowering all analysis or com- 
parison, and putting us quite beside ourselves, we can seldom 
see after thirty years, yet the remembrance of these visions out- 
lasts all other remembrances, and is a wreath of flowers on the 
oldest brows. But here is a strange fact; it may seem to many 
men, in revising their experience, that they have no fairer page 
in their life's book than the delicious memory of some passages 
wherein affection contrived to give a witchcraft surpassing the 
deep attraction of its own truth to a parcel of accidental and 
trivial circumstances. In looking backward, they may find 
that several things which were not the charm have more reality 
to this groping memory than the charm itself which embalmed 
them. But be our experience in particulars what it may, no 
man ever forgot the visitations of that power to his heart and 
brain, which created all things new; which was the dawn in 
him of music, poetry, and art; which made the face of nature 
radiant with purple light; the morning and the night varied 
enchantments ; when a single tone of one voice could make the 
heart bound, and the most trivial circumstance associated with 
one form is put in the amber of memory; when he became all 
eye when one was present, and all memory when one was gone; 
when the youth becomes a watcher of windows, and studious 
of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage ; when no 
place is too solitary, and none too silent, for him who has richer 
company and sweeter conversation in his new thoughts, than 
any old friends, though best and purest, can give him ; for the 
figures, the motions, the words of the beloved object are not 



LOVE 409 

like other images written in water, but, as Plutarch said, 
" enamelled in fire," and make the study of midnight. 

"Thou art not gone being gone, where'er thou art, 
Thou leav'st in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy loving heart." 

In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at the recol- 
lection of days when happiness was not happy enough, but 
must be drugged with the relish of pain and fear; for he touched 
the secret of the matter, who said of love, 

" All other pleasures are not worth its pains " ; 

and when the day was not long enough, but the night, too, must 
be consumed in keen recollections; when the head boiled all 
night on the pillow with the generous deed it resolved on ; when 
the moonlight was a pleasing fever, and the stars were letters, 
and the flowers ciphers, and the air was coined into song ; when 
all business seemed an impertinence, and all the men and 
women running to and fro in the streets mere pictures. 

The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all 
things alive and significant. Nature grows conscious. Every 
bird on the boughs of the tree sings now to his heart and soul. 
The notes are almost articulate. The clouds have faces as he 
looks on them. The trees of the forest, the waving grass, and 
the peeping flowers have grown intelligent; and he almost fears 
to trust them with the secret which they seem to invite. Yet 
nature soothes and sympathizes. In the green solitude he finds 
a dearer home than with men. 

"Fountain-heads and pathless groves, 
Places which pale passion loves, 
Moonlight walks, when all the fowls 
Are safely housed, save bats and owls, 
A midnight bell, a passing groan, — 
These are the sounds we feed upon." 

Behold there in the wood the fine madman. He is a palace 
of sweet sounds and sighs; he dilates; he is twice a man; he 
walks with arms akimbo; he soliloquizes; he accosts the grass 
and the trees; he feels the blood of the violet, the clover, and 
the lily in his veins; and he talks with the brook that wets 
his foot. 

The heats that have opened his perceptions of natural beauty 
have made him love music and verse. It is a fact often observed, 



4 io RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

that men have written good verses under the inspiration of 
passion, who cannot write well under any other circumstances. 

The like force has the passion over all his nature. It expands 
the sentiment; it makes the clown gentle, and gives the coward 
heart. Into the most pitiful and abject it will infuse a heart 
and courage to defy the world, so only it have the countenance 
of the beloved object. In giving him to another, it still more 
gives him to himself. He is a new man, with new perceptions, 
new and keener purposes, and a religious solemnity of charac- 
ter and aims. He does not longer appertain to his family and 
society; he is somewhat; he is a person; he is a soul. 

And here let us examine a little nearer the nature of that 
influence which is thus potent over the human youth. Beauty, 
whose revelation to man we now celebrate, welcome as the sun 
wherever it pleases to shine, which pleases everybody with it 
and with themselves, seems sufficient to itself. The lover can- 
not paint his maiden to his fancy poor and solitary. Like a tree 
in flower, so much soft, budding, informing loveliness is society 
for itself, and she teaches his eye why Beauty was pictured 
with Loves and Graces attending her steps. Her existence 
makes the world rich. Though she extrudes all other persons 
from his attention as cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies him 
by carrying out her own being into somewhat impersonal, large, 
mundane, so that the maiden stands to him for a representative 
of all select things and virtues. For that reason, the lover never 
sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to 
others. His friends find in her a likeness to her mother, or her 
sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no re- 
semblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, 
to rainbows, and the song of birds. 

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who can 
analyze the nameless charm which glances from one and 
another face and form? We are touched with emotions of ten- 
derness and complacency, but we cannot find whereat this 
dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points. It is destroyed 
for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to organization. 
Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love known 
and described in society, but, as it seems to me, to a quite other 
and unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy 
and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and foreshow. 



LOVE 411 

We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'- 
neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the 
most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, 
defying all attempts at appropriation and use. What else did 
Jean Paul Richter signify, when he said to music, "Away! 
away! thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless 
life I have not found, and shall not find." The same fluency 
may be observed in every work of the plastic arts. The statue 
is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when 
it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by 
compass and measuring- wand, but demands an active imagina- 
tion to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing. The 
god or hero of the sculptor is always represented in a transition 
from that which is representable to the senses, to that which is 
not. Then first it ceases to be a stone. The same remark holds 
of painting. And of poetry, the success is not attained when it 
lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new 
endeavors after the unattainable. Concerning it, Landor in- 
quires " whether it is not to be referred to some purer state of 
sensation and existence." 

In like manner, personal beauty is then first charming and 
itself, when it dissatisfies us with any end ; when it becomes a 
story without an end ; when it suggests gleams and visions, and 
not earthly satisfactions; when it makes the beholder feel his 
unworthiness; when he cannot feel his right to it, though he 
were Caesar; he cannot feel more right to it than to the firma- 
ment and the splendors of a sunset. 

Hence arose the saying, " If I love you, what is that to you? " 
We say so, because we feel that what we love is not in your will, 
but above it. It is not you but your radiance. It is that which 
you know not in yourself, and can never know. 

This agrees well with that high philosophy of Beauty which 
the ancient writers delighted in; for they said that the soul of 
man, embodied here on earth, went roaming up and down in 
quest of that other world of its own, out of which it came into 
this, but was soon stupefied by the light of the natural sun, and 
unable to see any other objects than those of this world, which 
are but shadows of real things. Therefore, the Deity sends the 
glory of youth before the soul, that it may avail itself of beauti- 
ful bodies as aids to its recollection of the celestial good and 



4 i2 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

fair; and the man beholding such a person in the female sex 
runs to her, and finds the highest joy in contemplating the 
form, movement, and intelligence of this person, because it 
suggests to him the presence of that which indeed is within the 
beauty, and the cause of the beauty. 

If, however, from too much conversing with material objects, 
the soul was gross, and misplaced its satisfaction in the body, 
it reaped nothing but sorrow; body being unable to fulfil the 
promise which beauty holds out; but if, accepting the hint of 
these visions and suggestions which beauty makes to his mind, 
the soul passes through the body, and falls to admire strokes of 
character, and the lovers contemplate one another in their dis- 
courses and their actions, then they pass to the true palace of 
beauty, more and more inflame their love of it, and by this love 
extinguishing the base affection, as the sun puts out the fire by 
shining on the hearth, they become pure and hallowed. By 
conversation with that which is in itself excellent, magnani- 
mous, lowly, and just, the lover comes to a warmer love of 
these nobilities, and a quicker apprehension of them. Then he 
passes from loving them in one to loving them in all, and so is 
the one beautiful soul only the door through- which he enters 
to the society of all true and pure souls. In the particular 
society of his mate, he attains a clearer sight of any spot, any 
taint, which her beauty has contracted from this world, and is 
able to point it out, and this with mutual joy that they are now 
able, without offence, to indicate blemishes and hindrances in 
each other, and give to each all help and comfort in curing the 
same. And, beholding in many souls the traits of the divine 
beauty, and separating in each soul that which is divine from 
the taint which it has contracted in the world, the lover ascends 
to the highest beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divin- 
ity, by steps on this ladder of created souls. 

Somewhat like this have the truly wise told us of love in all 
ages. The doctrine is not old, nor is it new. If Plato, Plutarch, 
and Apuleius taught it, so have Petrarch, Angelo, and Milton. 
It awaits a truer unfolding in opposition and rebuke to that 
subterranean prudence which presides at marriages with words 
that take hold of the upper world, whilst one eye is prowling in 
the cellar, so that its gravest discourse has a savor of hams and 
powdering-tubs. Worst, when this sensualism intrudes into the 



LOVE 413 

education of young women, and withers the hope and affection 
of human nature, by teaching that marriage signifies nothing 
but a housewife's thrift, and that woman's life has no other aim. 
But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only one scene in 
our play. In the procession of the soul from within outward, 
it enlarges its circles ever, like the pebble thrown into the pond, 
or the light>proceeding from an orb. The rays of the soul alight 
first on things nearest, on every utensil and toy, on nurses and 
domestics, on the house, and yard, and passengers, on the circle 
of household acquaintance, on politics, and geography, and 
history. But things are ever grouping themselves according to 
higher or more interior laws. Neighborhood, size, numbers, 
habits, persons, lose by degrees their power over us. Cause and 
effect, real affinities, the longing for harmony between the soul 
and the circumstance, the progressive, idealizing instinct, pre- 
dominate later, and the step backward from the higher to the 
lower relations is impossible. Thus even love, which is the 
deification of persons, must become more impersonal every day. 
Of this at first it gives no hint. Little think the youth and 
maiden who are glancing at each other across crowded rooms, 
with eyes so full of mutual intelligence, of the precious fruit 
long hereafter to proceed from this new, quite external stimu- 
lus. The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the 
bark and leaf-buds. From exchanging glances, they advance to 
acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery passion, to plighting 
troth, and marriage. Passion beholds its object as a perfect 
unit. The soul is wholly embodied, and the body is wholly 
ensouled. 

"Her pure and eloquent blood 
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, 
That one might almost say her body thought." 

Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the 
heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has no other aim, asks no 
more, than Juliet, — than Romeo. Night, day, studies, talents, 
kingdoms, religion, are all contained in this form full of soul, in 
this soul which is all form. The lovers delight in endearments, 
in avowals of love, in comparisons of their regards. When alone, 
they solace themselves with the remembered image of the other. 
Does that other see the same star, the same melting cloud, read 
the same book, feel the same emotion, that now delight me? 



4 i4 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

They try and weigh their affection, and, adding up costly 
advantages, friends, opportunities, properties, exult in discov- 
ering that willingly, joyfully, they would give all as a ransom 
for the beautiful, the beloved head, not one hair of which shall 
be harmed. But the lot of humanity is on these children. 
Danger, sorrow, and pain arrive to them, as to all. Love prays. 
It makes covenants with Eternal Power in behalf of this dear 
mate. The union which is thus effected, and which adds a new 
value to every atom in nature, for it transmutes every thread 
throughout the whole web of relation into a golden ray, and 
bathes the soul in a new and sweeter element, is yet a tempo- 
rary state. Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protesta- 
tions, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul 
that dwells in clay. It arouses itself at last from these endear- 
ments, as toys, and puts on the harness, and aspires to vast 
and universal aims. The soul which is in the soul of each, crav- 
ing a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects, and dis- 
proportion in the behavior of the other. Hence arise surprise, 
expostulation, and pain. Yet that which drew them to each 
other was signs of loveliness, signs of virtue; and these virtues 
are there, however eclipsed. They appear and reappear, and 
continue to attract; but the regard changes, quits the sign, 
and attaches to the substance. This repairs the wounded af- 
fection. Mean time, as life wears on, it proves a game of per- 
mutation and combination of all possible positions of the par- 
ties, to employ all the resources of each, and acquaint each 
with the strength and weakness of the other. For it is the 
nature and end of this relation, that they should represent 
the human race to each other. All that is in the world, which is 
or ought to be known, is cunningly wrought into the texture 
of man, of woman. 

"The person love does to us fit, 
Like manna, has the taste of all in it." 

The world rolls; the circumstances vary every hour. The 
angels that inhabit this temple of the body appear at the win- 
dows, and the gnomes and vices also. By all the virtues they 
are united. If there be virtue, all the vices are known as such; 
they confess and flee. Their once flaming regard is sobered by 
time in either breast, and, losing in violence what it gains in 



LOVE 415 

extent, it becomes a thorough good understanding. They resign 
each other, without complaint, to the good offices which man 
and woman are severally appointed to discharge in time, and 
exchange the passion which once could not lose sight of its 
object, for a cheerful, disengaged furtherance, whether present 
or absent, of each other's designs. At last they discover that 
all which at first drew them together, — those once sacred 
features, that magical play of charms, — was deciduous, had a 
prospective end, like the scaffolding by which the house was 
built; and the purification of the intellect and the heart, from 
year to year, is the real marriage, foreseen and prepared from 
the first, and wholly above their consciousness. Looking at 
these aims with which two persons, a man and a woman, so 
variously and correlatively gifted, are shut up in one house to 
spend in the nuptial society forty or fifty years, I do not won- 
der at the emphasis with which the heart prophesies this crisis 
from early infancy, at the profuse beauty with which the in- 
stincts deck the nuptial bower, and nature, and intellect, and 
art emulate each other in the gifts and the melody they bring 
to the epithalamium. 

Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not sex, 
nor person, nor partiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom 
everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom. We 
are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our per- 
manent state. But we are often made to feel that our affections 
are but tents of a night. Though slowly and with pain, the 
objects of the affections change, as the objects of thought do. 
There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the 
man, and make his happiness dependent on a person or persons. 
But in health the mind is presently seen again, — its over- 
arching vault, bright with galaxies of immutable lights, and the 
warm loves and fears that swept over us as clouds, must lose 
their finite character and blend with God, to attain their own 
perfection. But we need not fear that we can lose anything by 
the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to the end. 
That which is so beautiful and attractive as these relations 
must be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more 
beautiful, and so on forever. 



4 i6 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 1 ! 

Among the eminent persons of the nineteenth century, 
Bonaparte is far the best known, and the most powerful; and 
owes his predominance to the fidelity with which he expresses 
the tone of thought and belief, the aims of the masses of active 
and cultivated men. It is Swedenborg's theory, that every 
organ is made up of homogeneous particles; or, as it is some- 
times expressed, every whole is made of similars; that is, the 
lungs are composed of infinitely small lungs; the liver, of in- 
finitely small livers; the kidney, of little kidneys, etc. Follow- 
ing this analogy, if any man is found to carry with him the 
power and affections of vast numbers, if Napoleon is France, 
if Napoleon is Europe, it is because the people whom he sways 
are little Napoleons. 

In our society, there is a standing antagonism between the 
conservative and the democratic classes; between those who 
have made their fortunes, and the young and the poor who 
have fortunes to make; between the interests of dead labor — 
that is, the labor of hands long ago still in the grave, which labor 
is now entombed in money stocks, or in land and buildings 
owned by idle capitalists — and the interests of living labor, 
which seeks to possess itself of land, and buildings, and money 
stocks. The first class is timid, selfish, illiberal, hating innova- 
tion, and continually losing numbers by death. The second 
class is selfish also, encroaching, bold, self-relying, always out- 
numbering the other, and recruiting its numbers every hour by 
births. It desires to keep open every avenue to the competi- 
tion of all, and to multiply avenues; — the class of business men 
in America, in England, in France, and throughout Europe; 
the class of industry and skill. Napoleon is its representative. 
The instinct of active, brave, able men, throughout the middle 

1 Representative Men. This book, published in 1850, is composed of a course of 
seven lectures originally given before the Boston Lyceum in 1845-46. The 
representative men are Plato (Philosopher), Swedenborg (Mystic), Montaigne 
(Skeptic), Shakespeare (Poet), Napoleon (Man of the World), and Goethe 
(Writer). Of Emerson's regard for Napoleon, Mr. Edward Emerson writes in 
his Emerson in Concprd, "Any practical or executive talent in however humble 
a sphere, even of cowherd or stable-keeper, commanded his respect, but he took 
interest in great soldiers, read all the memoirs of Napoleon, and quotes him as 
often perhaps as any historical character." 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 417 

class everywhere, has pointed out Napoleon as the incarnate 
Democrat. He had their virtues and their vices; above all, he 
had their spirit or aim. That tendency is material, pointing at a 
sensual success, and employing the richest and most various 
means to that end ; conversant with mechanical powers, highly 
intellectual, widely and accurately learned and skilful, but 
subordinating all intellectual and spiritual forces into means to 
a material success. To be the rich man is the end. "God has 
granted," says the Koran, "to 'every people a prophet in its 
own tongue." Paris, and London, and New York, the spirit of 
commerce, of money, and material power, were also to have 
their prophet; and Bonaparte was qualified and sent. 

Every one of the million readers of anecdotes, or memoirs, or 
lives of Napoleon, delights in the page, because he studies in it 
his own history. Napoleon is thoroughly modern, and, at the 
highest point of his fortunes, has the very spirit of the news- 
papers. He is no saint, — to use his own word, " no capuchin," 
and he is no hero, in the high sense. The man in the street finds 
in him the qualities and powers of other men in the street. He 
finds him, like himself, by birth a citizen, who, by very intelli- 
gible merits, arrived at such a commanding position, that he 
could indulge all those tastes which the common man possesses, 
but is obliged to conceal and deny: good society, good books,- 
fast travelling, dress, dinners, servants without number, per- 
sonal weight, the execution of his ideas, the standing in the 
attitude of a benefactor to all persons about him, the refined 
enjoyments of pictures, statues # , music, palaces, and conven- 
tional honors, — precisely what is agreeable to the heart of 
every man in the nineteenth century, — this powerful man 
possessed. 

It is true that a man of Napoleon's truth of adaptation to 
the mind of the masses around him, becomes not merely repre- 
sentative, but actually a monopolizer and usurper of other 
minds. Thus Mirabeau plagiarized every good thought, every 
good word, that was spoken in France. Dumont relates, that 
he sat in the gallery of the Convention, and heard Mirabeau 
make a speech. It struck Dumont that he could fit it with- a 
peroration, which he wrote in pencil immediately, and showed 
it to Lord Elgin, who sat by him. Lord Elgin approved it, and 
Dumont, in the evening, showed it to Mirabeau. Mirabeau 



418 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

read it, pronounced it admirable, and declared he would incor- 
porate it into his harangue to-morrow, to the Assembly. "It is 
impossible," said Dumont, "as, unfortunately, I have shown 
it to Lord Elgin." "If you have shown it to Lord Elgin, and to 
fifty persons beside, I shall still speak it to-morrow": and he 
did speak it, with much effect, at the next day's session. For 
Mirabeau, with his overpowering personality, felt that these 
things, which his presence inspired, were as much his own as if 
he had said them, and that his adoption of them gave them 
their weight. Much more absolute and centralizing was the 
successor to Mirabeau's popularity, and to much more than his 
predominance in France. Indeed, a man of Napoleon's stamp 
almost ceases to have a private speech and" opinion. He is so 
largely receptive, and is so placed, that he comes to be a bureau 
for all the intelligence, wit, and power, of the age and country. 
He gains the battle; he makes the code; he makes the system of 
weights and measures; he levels the Alps; he builds the road. 
All distinguished engineers, savans, statists, report to him: so, 
likewise, do all good heads in every kind : he adopts the best 
measures, sets his stamp on them, and not these alone, but 
on every happy and memorable expression. Every sentence 
spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves 
reading, as it is the sense of France. 

Bonaparte was the idol of common men, because he had in 
transcendent degree the qualities and powers of common men. 
There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest 
ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy. Bona- 
parte wrought, in common with that great class he represented, 
for power and wealth, — but Bonaparte, specially, without 
any scruple as to the means. All the sentiments which embar- 
rass men's pursuit of these objects, he set aside. The sentiments 
were for women and children. Fontanes, in 1804, expressed 
Napoleon's own sense, when, in behalf of the Senate, he ad- 
dressed him, — "Sire, the desire of perfection is the worst 
disease that ever afflicted the human mind." The advocates of 
liberty, and of progress, are "ideologists"; — a word of con- 
tempt often in his mouth; — "Necker is an ideologist": 
"Lafayette is an ideologist." x 

1 " The discussion on Napoleon shows Emerson at his best as a connoisseur of 
men, and would alone prove that he did not addict himself to speculation out of 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 419 

An Italian proverb, too well known, declares that, "if you 
would succeed, you must not be too good." It is an advantage, 
within certain limits, to have renounced the dominion of the 
sentiments of piety, gratitude, and generosity; since, what was 
an impassable bar to us, and still is to others, becomes a con- 
venient weapon for our purposes; just as the river which was a 
formidable barrier, winter transforms into the smoothest of 
roads. 

Napoleon renounced, once for all, sentiments and affections, 
and would help himself with his hands and his head. With him 
is no miracle, and no magic. He is a worker in brass, in iron, 
in wood, in earth, in roads, in buildings, in money, and in 
troops, and a very consistent and wise master- workman. He is 
never weak and literary, but acts with the solidity and the 
precision of natural agents. He has not lost his native sense and 
sympathy with things. Men give way before such a man, as 
before natural events. To be sure, there are men enough who 
are immersed in things, as farmers, smiths, sailors, and me- 
chanics generally; and we know how real and solid such men 
appear in the presence of scholars and grammarians : but these 
men ordinarily lack the power of arrangement, and are like 
hands without a head. But Bonaparte superadded to this 
mineral and animal force, insight and generalization, so that 
men saw in him combined the natural and the intellectual 
power, as if the sea and land had taken flesh and begun to 
cipher. Therefore the land and sea seem to presuppose him. 
He came unto his own and they received him. This ciphering 
operative knows what he is working with, and what is the 
product. He knew the properties of gold and iron, of wheels and 
ships, of troops and diplomatists, and required that each should 
do after its kind. 

The art of war was the game in which he exerted his arith- 
metic. It consisted, according to him, in having always more 
forces than the enemy, on the point where the enemy is at- 
tacked, or where he attacks; and his whole talent is strained by 
endless manoeuvre and evolution, to march always on the 
enemy at an angle, and destroy his forces in detail. It is obvi- 

incapacity or contempt for the affairs of the world. The ideologist judges the 
man of action more shrewdly and justly than the man of action would have 
judged the ideologist." (Garnett, Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 152.) 



4 2o RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

ous that a very small force, skilfully and rapidly manoeuvring, 
so as always to bring two men against one at the point of en- 
gagement, will be an overmatch for a much larger body of men. 

The times, his constitution, and his early circumstances, 
combined to develop this pattern democrat. He had the virtues 
of his class, and the conditions for their activity. That com- 
mon-sense, which no sooner respects any end, than it finds the 
means to effect it; the delight in the use of means; in the choice, 
simplification, and combining of means; the directness and 
thoroughness of his work; the prudence with which all was 
seen, and the energy with which all was done, make him the 
natural organ and head of what I may almost call, from its 
extent, the modem party. 

Nature must have far the greatest share in every success, and 
so in his. Such a man was wanted, and such a man was born; 
a man of stone and iron, capable of sitting on horseback sixteen 
or seventeen hours, of going many days together without rest 
or food, except by snatches, and with the speed and spring of 
a tiger in action; a man not embarrassed by any scruples; com- 
pact, instant, selfish, prudent, and of a perception which did not 
suffer itself to be baulked or misled by any pretences of others, 
or any superstition, or any heat or haste of his own. "My hand 
of iron," he said, "was not at the extremity of my arm: it was 
immediately connected with my head." He respected the 
power of nature and fortune, and ascribed to it his superiority, 
instead of valuing himself, like inferior men, on his opiniona- 
tiveness, and waging war with nature. His favorite rhetoric lay 
in allusion to his star; and he pleased himself, as well as the 
people, when he styled himself the " Child of Destiny." "They 
charge me," he said, "with the commission of great crimes: 
men of my stamp do not commit crimes. Nothing has been 
more simple than my elevation : 't is in vain to ascribe it to 
intrigue or crime: it was owing to the peculiarity of the times, 
and to my reputation of having fought well against the enemies 
of my country. I have always marched with the opinion of 
great masses, and with events. Of what use, then, would crimes 
be to me? " Again he said, speaking of his son : "My son cannot 
replace me: I could not replace myself. I am the creature of 
circumstances." 
- He had a directness of action never before combined with so 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 421 

much comprehension. He is a realist terrific to all talkers, and 
confused truth-obscuring persons. He sees where the matter 
hinges, throws himself on the precise point of resistance, and 
slights all other considerations. He is strong in the right man- 
ner, namely, by insight. He never blundered into victory, but 
won his battles in his head, before he won them on the field. 
His principal means are in himself. He asks counsel of no other. 
In 1796, he writes to the Directory: "I have conducted the 
campaign without consulting any one. I should have done no 
good, if I had been under the necessity of conforming to the 
notions of another person. I have gained some advantages over 
superior forces, and when totally destitute of everything, be- 
cause, in the persuasion that your confidence was reposed in 
me, my actions were as prompt as my thoughts." 

History is full, down to this day, of the imbecility of kings 
and governors. They are a class of persons much to be pitied, 
for they know not what they should do. The weavers strike for 
bread; and the king and his ministers, not knowing what to do, 
meet them with bayonets. But Napoleon understood his busi- 
ness. Here was a man who, in each moment and emergency, 
knew what to do next. It is an immense comfort and refresh- 
ment to the spirits, not only of kings, but of citizens. Few men 
have any next; they live from hand to mouth, without plan, 
and are ever at the end of their line, and, after each action, wait 
for an impulse from abroad. Napoleon had been the first man 
of the world, if his ends had been purely public. As he is, he 
inspires confidence and vigor by the extraordinary unity of his 
action. He is firm, sure, self-denying, self -postponing, sacrific- 
ing everything to his aim, — money, troops, generals, and his 
own safety also, to his aim; not misled, like common adven- 
turers, by the splendor of his own means. "Incidents ought. 
not to govern policy," he said, "but policy, incidents." "To 
be hurried away by every event, is to have no political system 
at all." His victories were only so many doors, and he never 
for a moment lost sight of his way onward, in the dazzle and 
uproar of the present circumstance. He knew what to do, and 
he flew to his mark. He would shorten a straight line to come 
at his object. Horrible anecdotes may, no doubt, be collected 
from his history, of the price at which he bought his successes; 
but he must not therefore be set down as cruel; but only as one 



422 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

who knew no impediment to his will; not bloodthirsty, not 
cruel, — but woe to what thing or person stood in his way! 
Not bloodthirsty, but not sparing of blood, — and pitiless. 
He saw only the object: the obstacle must give way. "Sire, 
General Clarke cannot combine with General Junot, for the 
dreadful fire of the Austrian battery." — "Let him carry the 
battery." — "Sire, every regiment that approaches the heavy 
artillery is sacrificed: Sire, what orders?" — "Forward, for- 
ward!" Seruzier, a colonel of artillery, gives, in his Military 
Memoirs, the following sketch of a scene after the battle of 
Austerlitz: "At the moment in which the Russian army was 
making its retreat, painfully, but in good order, on the ice of the 
lake, the Emperor Napoleon came riding at full speed toward 
the artillery. 'You are losing time,' he cried; 'fire upon those 
masses; they must be ingulfed: fire upon the ice!' The order 
remained unexecuted for ten minutes. In vain several officers 
and myself were placed on the slope of a hill to produce the 
effect : their balls and mine rolled upon the ice, without break- 
ing it up. Seeing that, I tried a simple method of elevating light 
howitzers. The almost perpendicular fall of the heavy projec- 
tiles produced the desired effect. My method was immediately 
followed by the adjoining batteries, and in less than no time 
we buried" some 1 "thousands of Russians and Austrians under 
the waters of the lake." 

In the plenitude of his resources, every obstacle seemed to 
vanish. "There shall be no Alps," he said; and he built his per- 
fect roads, climbing by graded galleries their steepest precipices, 
until Italy was as open to Paris as any town in France. He laid 
his bones to, and wrought for his crown. Having decided what 
was to be done, he did that with might and main. He put out 
all his strength. He risked everything, and spared nothing, 
neither ammunition, nor money, nor troops, nor generals, nor 
himself. 

We like to see everything do its office after its kind, whether 
it be a milch-cow or a rattlesnake; and, if fighting be the best 
mode of adjusting national differences (as large majorities of 
men seem to agree), certainly Bonaparte was right in making 
it thorough. "The grand principle of war," he said, "was, that 

1 As I quote at second-hand, and cannot procure Seruzier, I dare not adopt 
the high figure I find. [Author's note.] 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 423 

an army ought always to be ready, by day and by night, and at 
all hours, to make all the resistance it is capable of making." 
He never economized his ammunition, but, on a hostile posi- 
tion, rained a torrent of iron, — shells, balls, grape-shot, — to 
annihilate all defence. On any point of resistance, he concen- 
trated squadron on squadron in overwhelming numbers, until 
it was swept out of existence. To a regiment of horse-chasseurs 
at Lobenstein, two days before the battle of Jena, Napoleon 
said: "My lads, you must not fear death; when soldiers brave 
death, they drive him into the enemy's ranks." In the fury of 
assault, he no more spared himself. He went to the edge of his 
possibility. It is plain that in Italy he did what he could, and 
all that he could. He came, several times, within an inch of 
ruin; and his own person was all but lost. He was flung into 
the marsh at Areola. The Austrians were between him and his 
troops, in the melee, and he was brought off with desperate 
efforts. At Lonato, and at other places, he was on the point of 
being taken prisoner. He fought sixty battles. He had never 
enough. Each victory was a new weapon. "My power would 
fall, were I not to support it by new achievements. Conquest 
has made me what I am, and conquest must maintain me." He 
felt, with every wise man, that as much life is needed for con- 
servation, as for creation. We are always in peril, always in a 
bad plight, just on the edge of destruction, and only to be 
saved by invention and courage. 

This vigor was guarded and tempered by the coldest pru- 
dence and punctuality. A thunderbolt in the attack, he was 
found invulnerable in his intrenchments. His very attack was 
never the inspiration of courage, but the result of calculation. 
His idea of the best defence consists in being still the attacking 
party. "My ambition," he says, "was great, but was of a cold 
nature." In one of his conversations with Las Casas, he re- 
marked, "As to moral courage, I have rarely met with the two- 
o'clock-in-the-morning kind: I mean unprepared courage, that 
which is necessary on an unexpected occasion; and which, in 
spite of the most unforeseen events, leaves full freedom of judg- 
ment and decision": and he did not hesitate to declare that he 
was himself eminently endowed with this " two-o'clock-in-the- 
morning courage, and that he had met with few persons equal 
to himself in this respect." 



424 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Everything depended on the nicety of his combinations, and 
the stars were not more punctual than his arithmetic. His per- 
sonal attention descended to the smallest particulars. "At 
Montebello, I ordered Kellermann to attack with eight hun- 
dred horse, and with these he separated the six thousand 
Hungarian grenadiers, before the very eyes of the Austrian 
cavalry. This cavalry was half a league off, and required a 
quarter of an hour to arrive on the field of action; and I have 
observed, that it is always these quarters of an hour that decide 
the fate of a battle." "Before he fought a battle, Bonaparte 
thought little about what he should do in case of success, but 
a great deal about what he should do in case of a reverse of 
fortune." The same prudence and good sense mark all his 
behavior. His instructions to his secretary at the Tuileries are 
worth remembering. "During the night, enter my chamber as 
seldom as possible. Do not awake me when you have any good 
news to communicate; with that there is no hurry. But when 
you bring bad news, rouse me instantly, for then there is not a 
moment to be lost." It was a whimsical economy of the same 
kind which dictated his practice, when general in Italy, in 
regard to his burdensome correspondence. He directed Bour- 
rienne to leave all letters unopened for three weeks, and then 
observed with satisfaction how large a part of the correspond- 
ence had thus disposed of itself, and no longer required an 
answer. His achievement of business was immense, and en- 
larges the known powers of man. There have been many work- 
ing kings, from Ulysses to William of Orange, but none who 
accomplished a tithe of this man's performance. 

To these gifts of nature, Napoleon added the advantage of 
having been born to a private and humble fortune. In his later 
days, he had the weakness of wishing to add to his crowns and 
badges the prescription of aristocracy; but he knew his debt to 
his austere education, and made no secret of his contempt for 
the born kings, and for "the hereditary asses," as he coarsely 
styled the Bourbons. He said that, "in their exile, they have 
learned nothing and forgot nothing." Bonaparte had passed 
through all the degrees of military service, but also was citizen 
before he was emperor, and so has the key to citizenship. His 
remarks and estimates discover the information and justness 
of measurement of the middle class. Those who had to deal 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 425 

with him, found that he was not to be imposed upon, but could 
cipher as well as another man. This appears in all parts of his 
Memoirs, dictated at St. Helena. When the expenses of the 
empress, of his household, of his palaces, had accumulated 
great debts. Napoleon examined the bills of the creditors him- 
self, detected overcharges and errors, and reduced the claims by 
considerable sums.. 

His grand weapon, namely, the millions whom he directed, 
he owed to the representative character which clothed him. 
He interests us as he stands for France and for Europe ; and he 
exists as captain and king, only as far as the revolution, or the 
interest of the industrious masses, found an organ and a leader 
in him. In the social interests, he knew the meaning and value 
of labor, and threw himself naturally on that side. I like an 
incident mentioned by one of his biographers at St. Helena. 
"When walking with Mrs. Balcombe, some servants, carrying 
heavy boxes, passed by on the road, and Mrs. Balcombe desired 
them, in rather an angry tone, to keep back. Napoleon inter- 
fered, saying, 'Respect the burden, Madam.'" 1 In the time of 
the empire, he directed attention to the improvement and em- 
bellishment of the markets of the capital. " The market-place," 
he said, "is the Louvre of the common people." The principal 
works that have survived him are his magnificent roads. He 
filled the troops with his spirit, and a sort of freedom and com- 
panionship grew up between him and them, which the forms of 
his court never permitted between the officers and himself. 
They performed, under his eye, that which no others could do. 
The best document of his relation to his troops is the order of 
the day on the morning of the battle of Austerlitz, in which 
Napoleon promises the troops that he will keep his person out 
of reach of fire. This declaration, which is the reverse of that 
ordinarily made by generals and sovereigns on the eve of a 
battle, sufficiently explains the devotion of the army to their 
leader. 

But though there is in particulars this identity between 
Napoleon and the mass of the people, his real strength lay in 
their conviction that he was their representative in his genius 

1 Emerson "was drawn more to Napoleon by this speech," says Mr. Edward 
Emerson, " than by any other story told of him, and he frequently used it as a 
lesson to his children and others, of honor and consideration for laborers and 
servants." 



426 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

and aims, not only when he courted, but when he controlled, 
and even when he decimated them by his conscriptions. He 
knew, as well as any Jacobin in France, how to philosophize on 
liberty and equality; and, when allusion was made to the 
precious blood of centuries, which was spilled by the killing of 
the Due d'Enghien, he suggested, "Neither is my blood ditch- 
water." The people felt that no longer the throne was occupied, 
and the land sucked of its nourishment, by a small class of 
legitimates, secluded from all community with the children of 
the soil, and holding the ideas and superstitions of a long- 
forgotten state of society. Instead of that vampyre, a man of 
themselves held, in the Tuileries, knowledge and ideas like their 
own, opening, of course, to them and their children, all places 
of power and trust. The day of sleepy, selfish policy, ever nar- 
rowing the means and opportunities of young men, was ended, 
and a day of expansion and demand was come. A market for 
all the powers and productions of man was opened; brilliant 
prizes glittered in the eyes of youth and talent. The old, iron- 
bound, feudal France was changed into a young Ohio or New 
York; and those who smarted under the immediate rigors of 
the new monarch, pardoned them, as the necessary severities 
of the military system which had driven out the oppressor. 
And even when the majority of the people had begun to ask, 
whether they had really gained anything under the exhausting 
levies of men and money of the new master, — the whole talent 
of the country, in every rank and kindred, took his part, and 
defended him as its natural patron. In 1814, when advised to 
rely on the higher classes, Napoleon said to those around him : 
" Gentlemen, in the situation in which I stand, my only nobility 
is the rabble of the Faubourgs." 

Napoleon met this natural expectation. The necessity of his 
position required a hospitality to every sort of talent, and its 
appointment to trusts; and his feeling went along with this 
policy. Like every superior person, he undoubtedly felt a 
desire for men and compeers, and a wish to measure his power 
with other masters, and an impatience of fools and underlings. 
In Italy, he sought for men, and found none. " Good God! " he 
said, "how rare men are! There are eighteen millions in Italy, 
and I have with difficulty found two, — Dandolo and Melzi." 
In later years, with larger experience, his respect for mankind 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 427 

was not increased. In a moment of bitterness, he said, to one 
of his oldest friends: "Men deserve the contempt with which 
they inspire me. I have only to put some gold-lace on the coat 
of my virtuous republicans, and they immediately become just 
what I wish them." This impatience at levity was, however, 
an oblique tribute of respect to those able persons who com- 
manded his regard, not only when he found them friends and 
coadjutors, but also when they resisted his will. He could not 
confound Fox and Pitt, Carnot, Lafayette, and Bernadotte, 
with the danglers of his court; and, in spite of the detraction 
which his systematic egotism dictated toward the great cap- 
tains who conquered with and for him, ample acknowledgments 
are made by him to Lannes, Duroc, Kleber, Dessaix, Massena, 
Murat, Ney, and Augereau. If he felt himself their patron, and 
the founder of their fortunes, as when he said, "I made my 
generals out of mud," he could not hide his satisfaction in 
receiving from them a seconding and support commensurate 
with the grandeur of his enterprise. In the Russian campaign, 
he was so much impressed by the courage and resources of 
Marshal Ney, that he said, " I have two hundred millions in my 
coffers, and I would give them all for Ney." The characters 
which he has drawn of several of his marshals are discriminat- 
ing, and, though they did not content the insatiable vanity of 
French officers, are, no doubt, substantially just. And, in fact, 
every species of merit was sought and advanced under his 
government. "I know," he said, "the depth and draught of 
water of every one of my generals." Natural power was sure 
to be well received at his court. Seventeen men, in his time, 
were raised from common soldiers to the rank of king, marshal, 
duke, or general; and the crosses of his Legion of Honor were 
given to personal valor, and not to family connection. "When 
soldiers have been baptized in the fire of a battle-field, they 
have all one rank in my eyes." 

When a natural king becomes a titular king, everybody is 
pleased and satisfied. The Revolution entitled the strong popu- 
lace of the Faubourg St. Antoine, and every horse-boy and 
powder-monkey in the army, to look on Napoleon, as flesh of 
his flesh, and the creature of his party; but there is something 
in the success of grand talent which enlists a universal sym- 
pathy. For, in the prevalence of sense and spirit over stupidity 



428 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

and malversation, all reasonable men have an interest; and, as 
intellectual beings, we feel the air purified by the electric shock, 
when material force is overthrown by intellectual energies. As 
soon as we are removed out of the reach of local and accidental 
partialities, man feels that Napoleon fights for him; these are 
honest victories; this strong steam-engine does our work. What- 
ever appeals to the imagination, by transcending the ordinary 
limits of human ability, wonderfully encourages and liberates 
us. This capacious head, revolving and disposing sovereignly 
trains of affairs, and animating such multitudes of agents; this 
eye, which looked through Europe; this prompt invention; this 
inexhaustible resource; — what events! what romantic pic- 
tures ! what strange situations ! — when spying the Alps, by a 
sunset in the Sicilian sea; drawing up his army for battle, in 
sight of the Pyramids, and saying to his troops, "From' the tops 
of those pyramids, forty centuries look down on you"; fording 
the Red Sea; wading in the gulf of the Isthmus of Suez. On the 
shore of Ptolemais, gigantic projects agitated him. "Had Acre 
fallen, I should have changed the face of the world." His army, 
on the night of the battle of Austerlitz, which was the anniver- 
sary of his inauguration as Emperor, presented him with a 
bouquet of forty standards taken in the fight. Perhaps it is a 
little puerile, the pleasure he took in making these contrasts 
glaring; as, when he pleased himself with making kings wait in 
his antechambers, at Tilsit, at Paris, and at Erfurt. 

We cannot, in the universal imbecility, indecision, and indo- 
lence of men, sufficiently congratulate ourselves on this strong 
and ready actor, who took occasion by the beard, and showed 
us how much may be accomplished by the mere force of such 
virtues as all men possess in less degrees; namely, by punctual- 
ity, by personal attention, by courage, and thoroughness. "The 
Austrians," he said, "do not know the value of time." I should 
cite him, in his earlier years, as a model of prudence. His power 
does not consist in any wild or extravagant force; in any enthu- 
siasm, like Mahomet's; or singular power of persuasion; but in 
the exercise of common sense on each emergency, instead of 
abiding by rules and customs. The lesson he teaches is that 
which vigor always teaches, — that there is always room for it. 
To what heaps of cowardly doubts is not that man's life an 
answer. When he appeared, it was the belief of all military 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 429 

men that there could be nothing new in war; as it is the belief 
of men to-day, that nothing new can be undertaken in politics, 
or in church, or in letters, or in trade, or in farming, or in our 
social manners and customs; and as it is, at all times, the belief 
of society that the world is used up. But Bonaparte knew 
better than society; and, moreover, knew that he knew better. 
I think all men know better than they do ; know that the insti- 
tutions we so volubly commend are go-carts and baubles; but 
they dare not trust their presentiments. Bonaparte relied on 
his own sense, and did not care a bean for other people's. The 
world treated his novelties just as it treats everybody's novel- 
ties, — made infinite objection; mustered all the impediments; 
but he snapped his ringer at their objections. "What creates 
great difficulty," he remarks, "in the profession of the land 
commander, is the necessity of feeding so many men and ani- 
mals. If he allows himself to be guided by the commissaries, he 
will never stir, and all his expeditions will fail." An example of 
his common sense is what he says of the passage of the Alps in 
winter, which all writers, one repeating after the other, had 
described as impracticable. "The winter," says Napoleon, "is 
not the most unfavorable season for the passage of lofty moun- 
tains. The snow is then firm, the weather settled, and there is 
nothing to fear from avalanches, the real and only danger to be 
apprehended in the Alps. On those high mountains, there are 
often very fine days in December, of a dry cold, with extreme 
calmness in the air." Read his account, too, of the way in which 
battles are gained. "In all battles, a moment occurs, when the 
bravest troops, after having made the greatest efforts, feel in- 
clined to run. That terror proceeds from a want of confidence 
in their own courage; and it only requires a slight opportunity, 
a pretence, to restore confidence to them. The art is to give rise 
to the opportunity, and to invent the pretence. At Areola, I 
won the battle with twenty-five horsemen. I seized that mo- 
ment of lassitude, gave every man a trumpet, and gained the 
day with this handful. You see that two armies are two bodies 
which meet, and endeavor to frighten each other: a moment of 
panic occurs, and that moment must be turned to advantage. 
When a man has been present in many actions, he distinguishes 
that moment without difficulty: it is as easy as casting up an 
addition." 1 



430 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

This deputy of the nineteenth century added to his gifts a 
capacity for speculation on general topics. He delighted in 
running through the range of practical, of literary, and of 
abstract questions. His opinion is always original, and to the 
purpose. On the voyage to Egypt, he liked, after dinner, to fix 
on three or four persons to support a proposition, and as many 
to oppose it. He gave a subject, and the discussions turned on 
questions of religion, the different kinds of government, and the 
art of war. One day, he asked, whether the planets were inhab- 
ited? On another, what was the age of the world? Then he 
proposed to consider the probability of the destruction of the 
globe, either by water or by fire : at another time, the truth or 
fallacy of presentiments, and the interpretation of dreams. He 
Was very fond of talking of religion. In 1806, he conversed with 
Fournier, Bishop of Montpellier, on matters of theology. There 
were two points on which they could not agree, viz., that of 
hell, and that of salvation out of the pale of the church. The 
Emperor told Josephine, that he disputed like a devil on these 
two points, on which the Bishop was inexorable. To the phil- 
osophers he readily yielded all that was proved against religion 
as the work of men and time; but he would not hear of material- 
ism. One fine night, on deck, amid a clatter of materialism, 
Bonaparte pointed to the stars, and said, "You may talk as 
long as you please, gentlemen, but who made all that?" He 
delighted in the conversation of men of science, particularly of 
Monge and Berthollet; but the men of letters he slighted; " they 
were manufacturers of phrases." Of medicine, too, he was fond 
of talking, and with those of its practitioners whom he most 
esteemed, — with Corvisart at Paris, and with Antonomarchi at 
St. Helena. "Believe me," he said to the last, "we had better 
leave off all these remedies : life is a fortress which neither you 
nor I know anything about. Why throw obstacles in the way of 
its defence? Its own means are superior to all the apparatus of 
your laboratories. Corvisart candidly agreed with me, that all 
your filthy mixtures are good for nothing. Medicine is a collec- 
tion of uncertain prescriptions, the results of which, taken 
collectively, are more fatal than useful to mankind. Water, 
air, and cleanliness are the chief articles in my pharma- 
copoeia." 

His memoirs, dictated to Count Montholon and General 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 431 

Gourgaud, at St. Helena, have great value, after all the deduc- 
tion that, it seems, is to be made from them, on account of his 
known disingenuousness. He has the good-nature of strength 
and conscious superiority. I admire his simple, clear narrative 
of his battles; good as Caesar's; his good-natured and sufficiently 
respectful account of Marshal Wurmser and his other antago- 
nists, and his own equality as a writer to his varying subject. 
The most agreeable portion is the Campaign in Egypt. 

He had hours of thought and wisdom. In intervals of leisure, 
either in the camp or the palace, Napoleon appears as a man of 
genius, directing on abstract questions the native appetite for 
truth, and the impatience of words, he was wont to show in 
war. He could enjoy every play of invention, a romance, a 
bon-mot, as well as a stratagem in a campaign. He delighted to 
fascinate Josephine and her ladies, in a dim-lighted apartment, 
by the terrors of a fiction, to which his voice and dramatic 
power lent every addition. 

I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle class of 
modern society; of the throng who fill the markets, shops, 
counting-houses, manufactories, ships, of the modern world, 
aiming to be rich. He was the agitator, the destroyer of pre- 
scription, the internal improver, the liberal, the radical, the 
inventor of means, the opener of doors and markets, the sub- 
verter of monopoly and abuse. Of course, the rich and aristo- 
cratic did not like him. England, the centre of capital, and 
Rome and Austria, centres of tradition and genealogy, opposed 
him. The consternation of the dull and conservative classes, 
the terror of the foolish o],d men and old women of the Roman 
conclave, — who in their despair took hold of anything, and 
would cling to red-hot iron, — the vain attempts of statists to 
amuse and deceive him, of the Emperor of Austria to bribe him; 
and the instinct of the young, ardent, and active men, every- 
where, which pointed him out as the giant of the middle class, 
make his history bright and commanding. He had the virtues 
of the masses of his constituents: he had also their vices. I am 
sorry that the brilliant picture has its reverse. But that is the 
fatal quality which we discover in our pursuit of wealth, that 
it is treacherous, and is bought by the breaking or weakening 
of the sentiments; and it is inevitable that we should find the- 
same fact in the history of this champion, who proposed to 



432 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

himself simply a brilliant career, without any stipulation or 
scruple concerning the means. 

Bonaparte was singularly destitute of generous sentiments. 
The highest-placed individual in the most cultivated age and 
population of the world, — he has not the merit of common 
truth and honesty. He is unjust to his generals; egotistic, and 
monopolizing; meanly stealing the credit of their great actions 
from Kellermann, from Bernadotte; intriguing to involve his 
faithful Junot in hopeless bankruptcy, in order to drive him to 
a distance from Paris, because the familiarity of his manners 
offends the new pride of his throne. He is a boundless liar. The 
official paper, his Moniteurs, and all his bulletins, are proverbs 
for saying what he wished to be believed; and worse, — he sat, 
in his premature old age, in his lonely island, coldly falsifying 
facts, and dates, and characters, and giving to history a theatri- 
cal eclat. Like all Frenchmen, he has a passion for stage effect. 
Every action that breathes of generosity is poisoned by this 
calculation. His star, his love of glory, his doctrine of the im- 
mortality of the soul, are all French. " I must dazzle and aston- 
ish. If I were to give the liberty of the press, my power could 
not last three days." To make a great noise is his favorite 
design. "A great reputation is a great noise; the more there is 
made, the farther off it is heard. Laws, institutions, monu- 
ments, nations, all fall; but the noise continues, and resounds 
in after ages." His doctrine of immortality is simply fame. His 
theory of influence is not flattering. "There are two levers for 
moving men, — interest and fear. Love is a silly infatuation, 
depend upon it. Friendship is but a name. I love nobody. I do 
not even love my brothers: perhaps Joseph, a little, from habit, 
and because he is my elder; and Duroc, I love him too; but 
why? — because his character pleases me : he is stern and reso- 
lute, and, I believe, the fellow never shed a tear. For my part, 
I know very well that I have no true friends. As long as I con- 
tinue to be what I am, I may have as many pretended friends 
as I please. Leave sensibility to women: but men should be 
firm in heart and purpose, or they should have nothing to do 
with war and government." He was thoroughly unscrupulous. 
He would steal, slander, assassinate, drown, and poison, as his 
interest dictated. He had no generosity; but mere vulgar 
hatred : he was intensely selfish : he was perfidious : he cheated 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD 433 

at cards: he was a prodigious gossip; and opened letters; and 
delighted in his infamous police; and rubbed his hands with joy- 
when he had intercepted some morsel of intelligence concerning 
the men and women about him, boasting that "he knew every- 
thing"; and interfered with the cutting the dresses of the 
women; and listened after the hurrahs and the compliments of 
the street, incognito. His manners were coarse. He treated 
women with low familiarity. He had the habit of pulling their 
ears, and pinching their cheeks, when he was in good-humor, 
and of pulling the ears and whiskers of men, and of striking and 
horse-play with them, to his last days. It does not appear that 
he listened at keyholes, or, at least, that he was caught at it. 
In short, when you have penetrated through all the circles of 
power and splendor, you were not dealing with a gentleman, 
at last; but with an impostor and a rogue: and he fully deserves 
the epithet of Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter. 

In describing the two parties into which modern society 
divides itself, — the democrat and the conservative, — I said, 
Bonaparte represents the Democrat, or the party of men of 
business, against the stationary or conservative party. I 
omitted then to say, what is material to the statement, namely, 
that these two parties differ only as young and old. The demo- 
crat is a young conservative ; the conservative is an old demo- 
crat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed, 
— because both parties stand on the one ground of the su- 
preme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the 
other to keep. Bonaparte may be said to represent the whole 
history of this party, its youth and its age; yes, and with poetic 
justice, its fate, in his own. The counter-revolution, the counter- 
party, still waits for its organ and representative, in a lover 
and a man of truly public and universal aims. 

Here was an experiment, under the most favorable condi- 
tions, of the powers of intellect without conscience. Never was 
such a leader so endowed, and so weaponed ; never leader found 
such aids and followers. And what was the result of this vast 
talent and power, of these immense armies, burned cities, 
squandered treasures, immolated millions of men, of this de- 
moralized Europe? It came to no result. All passed away, like 
the smoke of his artillery, and left no trace. He left France 



434 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

smaller, poorer, feebler, than he found it; and the whole contest 
for freedom was to be begun again. The attempt was, in prin- 
ciple, suicidal. France served him with life, and limb, and 
estate, as long as it could identify its interest with him; but 
when men saw that after victory was another war; after the 
destruction of armies, new conscriptions; and they who had 
toiled so desperately were never nearer to the reward, — they 
could not spend what they had earned, nor repose on their down- 
beds, nor strut in their chateaux, — they deserted him. Men 
found that his absorbing egotism was deadly to all other men. 
It resembled the torpedo, which inflicts a succession of shocks 
on any one who takes hold of it, producing spasms which con- 
tract the muscles of the hand, so that the man cannot open his 
fingers; and the animal inflicts new and more violent shocks, 
until he paralyzes and kills his victim. So, this exorbitant ego- 
tist narrowed, impoverished, and absorbed the power and exist- 
ence of those who served him ; and the universal cry of France, 
and of Europe, in 1814, was, "enough of liim'': "assez de 
Bonaparte." 

It was not Bonaparte's fault. He did all that in him lay, to 
live and thrive without moral principle. It was the nature of 
things, the eternal law of the man and the world, which baulked 
and ruined him; and the result, in a million experiments would 
be the same. Every experiment, by multitudes or by individu- 
als, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail. The pacific 
Fourier will be as inefficient as the pernicious Napoleon. As 
long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, 
of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches 
will leave us sick ; there will be bitterness in our laughter ; and 
our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which 
we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men. 



HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR 1 

At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider 
every spot as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed 
the country on every side within a dozen miles of where I live. 
In imagination I have bought all the farms in succession, for all 
were to be bought, and I knew their price. I walked over each 
farmer's premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on hus- 
bandry with him, took his farm at his price, at any price, mort- 
gaging it to him in my mind ; even put a higher price on it, — 
took everything but a deed of it, — took his word for his deed, 
for I dearly love to talk, — cultivated it, and him too to some 
extent, I trust, and withdrew when I had enjoyed it long 
enough, leaving him to carry it on. This experience entitled 
me to be regarded as a sort of real-estate broker by my friends. 
Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated 
from me accordingly. What is a house but a sedes, a seat? — 
better if a country seat. I discovered many a site for a house 
not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought 
too far from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far 
from it. Well, there I might live, I said; and there I did live, 
for an hour, a summer and a winter life; saw how I could let 
the years run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring 
come in. The future inhabitants of this region, wherever they 
may place their houses, may be sure that they have been antici- 
pated. An afternoon sufficed to layout the land into orchard, 
wood-lot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines 
should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted 
tree could be seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie, 
fallow perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number 
of things which he can afford to let alone. 

1 W alien, chapter n. The first chapter, "Economy," opens with these words: 
"When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in 
the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on 
the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by 
the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months." (July, 
1845, to September, 1847; the book itself was published in 1854.) 



436 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

My imagination carried me so far that I even had the refusal 
of several farms, — the refusal was all I wanted, — but I never 
got my fingers burned by actual possession. The nearest that I 
came to actual possession was when I bought the Hollowell 
place, and had begun to sort my seeds, and collected materials 
with which to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with; 
but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife — every 
man has such a wife — changed her mind and wished to keep 
it, and he offered me ten dollars to release him. Now, to speak 
the truth, I had but ten cents in the world, and it surpassed my 
arithmetic to tell, if I was that man who had ten cents, or who 
had a farm, or ten dollars, or all together. However, I let him 
keep the ten dollars and the farm too, for I had carried it far 
enough ; or rather, to be generous, I sold him the farm for just 
what I gave for it, and, as he was not a rich man, made him a 
present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, 
and materials for a wheelbarrow left. I found thus that I had 
been a rich man without any damage to my poverty. But I 
retained the landscape, and I have since annually carried off 
what it yielded without a wheelbarrow. With respect to land- 
scapes, — 

"I am monarch of all I survey, 1 
My right there is none to dispute." 

I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the 
most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed 
that he had got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner does 
not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in 
rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly 
impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and 
left the farmer only the skimmed milk. 

The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me, were: its 
complete retirement, being about two miles from the village, 
half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the 
highway by a broad field ; its bounding on the river, which the 
owner said protected it by its fogs from frosts in the spring, 
though that was nothing to me; the gray color and ruinous 
state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated fences, which 
put such an interval between me and the last occupant; the 
hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, gnawed by rabbits, 

1 One of Thoreau's many occupations was surveying. 



WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR 437 

showing what kind of neighbors I should have; but above all, 
the recollection I had of it from my earliest voyages up the 
river, when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of 
red maples, through which I heard the house-dog bark. I was 
in haste to buy it, before the proprietor finished getting out 
some rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing 
up some young birches which had sprung up in the pasture, or, 
in short, had made any more of his improvements. To enjoy 
these advantages I was ready to carry it on; like Atlas, to take 
the world on my shoulders, — I never heard what compensa- 
tion he received for that, — and do all those things which had 
no other motive or excuse but that I might pay for it and be 
unmolested in my possession of it; for I knew all the while that 
it would yield the most abundant crop of the kind I wanted, if 
I could only afford to let it alone. But it turned out as I have 
said. 

All that I could say, then, with respect to farming on a large 
scale — I have always cultivated a garden — was, that I had 
had my seeds ready. Many think that seeds improve with age. 
I have no doubt that time discriminates between the good and 
the bad ; and when at last I shall plant, I shall be less likely to 
be disappointed. But I would say to my fellows, once for all, 
As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but 
little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the 
county jail. 

Old Cato, whose De Re Rustled is my Cultivator, says, — and 
the only translation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the 
passage, — "When you think of getting a farm turn it thus in 
your mind, not to buy greedily; nor spare your pains to look 
at it, and do not think it enough to go round it once. The 
oftener you go there the more it will please you, if it is good." 
I think I shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it as 
long as I live, and be buried in it first, that it may please me 
the more at last. 

The present was my next experiment of this kind, which I 
purpose to describe more at length, for convenience putting the 
experience of two years into one. As I have said, I do not pro- 
pose to write an ode to dejection, 1 but to brag as lustily as 
1 The title of a poem by Coleridge. 



438 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to 
wake my neighbors up. 

When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to 
spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was 
on Independence Day, or the Fourth of July, 1845, m Y house 
was not finished for winter, but was merely a defence against 
the rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls being of 
rough, weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made 
it cool at night. The upright white hewn studs and freshly 
planed door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look, 
especially in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with 
dew, so that I fancied that by noon some sweet gum would ex- 
ude from them. To my imagination it retained throughout the 
day more or less of this auroral character, reminding me of a 
certain house on a mountain which I had visited a year before. 
This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travel- 
ling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. The 
winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over 
the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial 
parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever 
blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the 
ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth 
everywhere. 

The only house I had been the owner of before, if I except a 
boat, was a tent, which I used occasionally when making excur- 
sions in the summer, and this is still rolled up in my garret; but 
the boat, after passing from hand to hand, has gone down the 
stream of time. With this more substantial shelter about me, I 
had made some progress toward settling in the world. This 
frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of crystallization around me, 
and reacted on the builder. It was suggestive somewhat as a 
picture in outlines. I did not need to go outdoors to take the 
air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness. 
It was not so much within-doors as behind a door where I sat, 
even in the rainiest weather. The Harivansa * says, "An abode 
without birds is like a meat without seasoning." Such was not 
my abode, for I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; 
not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near 
them. I was not only nearer to some of those which commonly 
1 One of the sacred books of the Hindoos. 



WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR 439 

frequent the garden and the orchard, but to those wilder and 
more thrilling songsters of the forest which never, or rarely, 
serenade a villager, — the wood thrush, the veery, the scarlet 
tanager, the field sparrow, the whip-poor-will, and many others. 

I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and 
a half south of the village of Concord and somewhat higher 
than it, in the midst of an extensive wood between that town 
and Lincoln, and about two miles south of that our only field 
known to fame, Concord Battle Ground; but I was so low in 
the woods that the opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest, 
covered with wood, was my most distant horizon. For the first 
week, whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like 
a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above 
the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throw- 
ing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by 
degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was re- 
vealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing 
in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some 
nocturnal conventicle. The very dew seemed to hang upon the 
trees later into the day than usual, as on the sides of mountains. 

This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the inter- 
vals of a gentle rain-storm in August, when, both air and water 
being perfectly still, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had 
all the serenity of evening, and the wood thrush sang around, 
and was heard from shore to shore. A lake like this is never 
smoother than at such a time ; and the clear portion of the air 
above it being shallow and darkened by clouds, the water, full 
of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself so much 
the more important. From a hill-top near by, where the wood 
had been recently cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward 
across the pond, through a wide indentation in the hills which 
form the shore there, where their opposite sides sloping toward 
each other suggested a stream flowing out in that direction 
through a wooded valley, but stream there was none. That 
way I looked between and over the near green hills to some 
distant and higher ones in the horizon, tinged with blue. In- 
deed, by standing on tiptoe I could catch a glimpse of some of 
the peaks of the still bluer and more distant mountain ranges 
in the northwest, those true-blue coins from heaven's own mint, 
and also of some portion of the village. But in other directions, 



440 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

even from this point, I could not see over or beyond the woods 
which surrounded me. It is well to have some water in your 
neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth. One 
value even of the smallest well is, that when you look into it 
you see that earth is not continent but insular. This is as impor- 
tant as that it keeps butter cool. When I looked across the pond 
from this peak toward the Sudbury meadows, which in time of 
flood I distinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their 
seething valley, like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the 
pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and floated even by 
this small sheet of intervening water, and I was reminded that 
this on which I dwelt was but dry land. 

Though the view from my door was still more contracted, I 
did not feel crowded or confined in the least. There was pasture 
enough for my imagination. The low shrub oak plateau to 
which the opposite shore arose stretched away toward the 
prairies of the West and the steppes of Tartary, affording ample 
room for all the roving families of men. "There are none happy 
in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon," — said 
Damodara, 1 when his herds required new and larger pastures. 

Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to 
those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which 
had most attracted me. Where I lived was as far off as many a 
region viewed nightly by astronomers. We are wont to imagine 
rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial 
corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia's 
Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my 
house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever 
new and unprofaned, part of the universe. If it were worth the 
while to settle in those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, 
to Aldebaran or Altair, then I was really there, or at an equal 
remoteness from the life which I had left behind, dwindled and 
twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be 
seen only in moonless nights by him. Such was that part of 
creation where I had squatted; — 

"There was a shepherd that did live, 
And held his thoughts as high 
As were the mounts whereon his flocks 
Did hourly feed him by." 

1 Krishna, a Hindoo deity. 



WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR 441 

What should we think of the shepherd's life if his flocks always 
wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts? 

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of 
equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. 
I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. 
I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious 
exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that 
characters were engraven on the bathing tub of King Tching- 
thang to this effect: " Renew thyself completely each day; do 
it again, and again, and forever again." I can understand that. 
Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected 
by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and un- 
imaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when 
I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any 
trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's requiem ; itself 
an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and 
wanderings. * There was something cosmical about it ; a standing 
advertisement, till forbidden, 2 of the everlasting vigor and fer- 
tility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable 
season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least 
somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us 
awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little^ 
is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which 
we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical 
nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly 
acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by 
the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and 
a fragrance filling the air — to a higher life than we fell asleep 
from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be 
good, no less than the light. That man who does not believe 
that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral 
hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pur- 
suing a descending and darkening way. After a partial cessa- 
tion of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, 
are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what 
noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say, 
transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The 
Vedas say, "All intelligences awake with the morning." Poe- 

1 The wrath of Achilles and the wanderings of Ulysses. 

2 A phrase used by printers to indicate a standing advertisement. 



442 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

try and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions 
of men, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like 
Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at 
sunrise. 1 To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace 
with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not 
what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morn- 
ing is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral 
reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give 
so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumber- 
ing? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been 
overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed some- 
thing. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but 
only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual 
exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine 
life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man 
who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face? 

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not 
by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, 
which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no 
more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man 
to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to 
be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and 
so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious 
to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through 
which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality 
of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to 
make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation 
of his most elevated and critical hour. If we .refused, or rather 
used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would 
distinctly inform us how this might be done. 

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to 
front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn 
what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that 
I had not lived. 2 I did not wish to live what was not life, living 

1 According to fable, when the rays of the sun reached the statue of 
Memnon, it gave forth music. 

2 Cf. the statement in chapter i: "My purpose in going to Walden Pond was 
not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business 
with the fewest obstacles; to be hindered from accomplishing which for want of 
a little common sense, a little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad 
as foolish." 



WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR 443 

is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was 
quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the 
marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to 
rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, 
to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, 
if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine 
meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it 
were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a 
true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it ap- 
pears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is 
of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded 
that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy 
him forever." 

Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that 
we were long ago changed into men ; like pygmies we fight with 
cranes; 1 it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our 
best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable 
wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest 
man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in 
extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Sim- 
plicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two 
or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million 
count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb- 
nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are 
the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one 
items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not 
founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by 
dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who 
succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if 
it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; 
and reduce other things in proportion. Our life is like a German 
Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary for- 
ever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it 
is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its so- 
called internal improvements, which, by the way- are all ex- 
ternal and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown 
establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its 
own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of 
calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the 

1 Iliad, in, 3-7. 



444 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

land; and the only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, 
a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation 
of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that 
the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a 
telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, 
whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons 
or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, 
and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go 
to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build rail- 
roads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven 
in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, 
who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it 
rides upon us. Did you ever think what, those sleepers are that 
underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a 
Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered 
with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are 
sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is 
laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of 
riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. 
And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a 
supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him 
up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about 
it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes 
a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and 
level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may some- 
time get up again. 

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We 
are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say 
that a stitch in time .saves nine, and so they take a thousand 
stitches to-day to save nine to-morrow. As for work, we have n't 
any of any consequence. We have the Saint Vitus's dance, and 
cannot possibly keep our heads still. If I should only give a 
few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without 
setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the out- 
skirts of Concord, notwithstanding that press of engagements 
which was his excuse so many times this morning, nor a boy, 
nor a woman, I might almost say, but would forsake all and 
follow that sound, not mainly to save property from the flames, 
but, if we will confess the truth, much more to see it burn, 
since burn it must, and we, be it known, did not set it on fire, 



WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR 445 

— or to see it put out, and have a hand in it, if that is done as 
handsomely; yes, even if it were the parish church itself. 
Hardly a man takes a half-hour's nap after dinner, but when 
he wakes he holds up his head and asks, "What's the news?" 
as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some give 
directions to be waked every half-hour, doubtless for no other 
purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have 
dreamed. After a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as 
the breakfast. "Pray tell me anything new that has happened 
to a man anywhere on this globe," — and he reads it over his 
coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this 
morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that 
he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, 
and has but the rudiment of an eye himself. 

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I 
think that there are very few important communications 
made through it. To speak critically, I never received more 
than one or two letters in my life — I wrote this some years 
ago — that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, com- 
monly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man 
that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in 
jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a 
newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or 
killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, 
or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western 
Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in 
the winter, — we never need read of another. One is enough. 
If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a 
myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, 
as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old 
women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this 
gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one 
of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that 
several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establish- 
ment were broken by the pressure, — news which I seriously 
think a ready wit might write a twelvemonth, or twelve years, 
beforehand with sufficient accuracy. As for Spain, for instance, 
if you know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta, and 
Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to time in the 
right proportions, — they may have changed the names a little 



446 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

since I saw the papers, — and serve up a bull-fight when other 
entertainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give us as 
good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in Spain as the 
most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the news- 
papers : and as for England, almost the last significant scrap of 
news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649; and if you 
have learned the history of her crops for an average year, you 
never need attend to that thing again, unless your speculations 
are of a merely pecuniary character. If one may judge who 
rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen 
in foreign parts, a French revolution not excepted. 

What news ! how much more important to know what that is 
which was never old! "Kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of the 
state of Wei) sent a man to Khoung-tseu to know his news. 
Khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be seated near him, and 
questioned him in these terms: What is your master doing? 
The messenger answered with respect: My master desires to 
diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the 
end of them. The messenger being gone, the philosopher re- 
marked: What a worthy messenger! What a worthy messen- 
ger!" The preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy 
farmers on their day of rest at the end of the week, — for Sun- 
day is the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week, and not the fresh 
and brave beginning of a new one, — with this one other 
draggle-tail of a sermon, should shout with thundering voice, 
"Pause! Avast! Why so seeming fast, but deadly slow? " 

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while 
reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities 
only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare 
it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and 
the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. If we respected only 
what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry 
would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and 
wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any 
permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty 
pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always 
exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering, 
and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and 
confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which 
still is built on purely illusory foundations. Children, who play 



WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR 447 

life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, 
who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser 
by experience, that is, by failure. I have read in a Hindoo book, 
that "there was a king's son, who, being expelled in infancy 
from his native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing 
up to maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the 
barbarous race with which he lived. One of his father's minis- 
ters having discovered him, revealed to him what he was, and 
the misconception of his character was removed, and he knew 
himself to be a prince. So soul," continues the Hindoo phi- 
losopher, "from the circumstances in which it is placed, mis- 
takes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by 
some holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be Brahme" I 
perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean 
life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface 
of things. We think that that is which appears to be. If a man 
should walk through this town and see only the reality, where, 
think you, would the "Mill-dam" 1 go to? If he should give us 
an account of the realities he beheld there, we should not recog- 
nize the place in his description. Look at a meeting-house, or 
a court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say 
what that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all 
go to pieces in your account of them. Men esteem truth remote, 
in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before 
Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed some- 
thing true and sublime. But all these times and places and 
occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the 
present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of 
all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is 
sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drench- 
ing of the reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly 
and obediently answers to our conceptions ; whether we travel 
fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in 
conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair 
and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could 
accomplish it. 

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be 
thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing 
that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, 
1 The centre of Concord, largely devoted to business and gossip. 



448 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

gently and without perturbation; let company come and let 
company go, let the bells ring and the children cry, — deter- 
mined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go 
with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that 
terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the 
meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for 
the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with 
morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast 
like Ulysses. 1 If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is 
hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We 
will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle 
ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the 
mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and 
delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, 
through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and 
Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and phi- 
losophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks 
in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no 
mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet 
and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a 
state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a 
Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know 
how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered 
from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face 
to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as 
if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through 
the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your 
mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we 
are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel 
cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our 
business. 

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but 
while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow 
it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I 
would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly 
with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of 
the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as 
wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it dis- 
cerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish 
1 While he was passing the Sirens. 



SOLITUDE 449 

to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My 
head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated 
in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrow- 
ing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with 
it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I 
think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts ; so by the 
divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will 
begin to mine. 

SOLITUDE 1 

This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, 
and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with 
a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along 
the stony shore of the pond in my shirt-sleeves, though it is 
cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to 
attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. 
The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the 
whip-poor-will is borne on the rippling wind from over the 
water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves 
almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is 
rippled but not ruffled. These small waves raised by the eve- 
ning wind are as remote from storm as the smooth reflecting 
surface. Though it is now dark, the wind still blows and roars 
in the wood, the waves still dash, and some creatures lull the 
rest with their notes. The repose is never complete. The wild- 
est animals do not repose, but seek their prey now; the fox, 
and skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and woods without 
fear. They are Nature's watchmen, — links which connect the 
days of animated life. 

When I return to my house I find that visitors have been 
there and left their cards, either a bunch of flowers, or a wreath 
of evergreen, or a name in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or a 
chip. They who come rarely to the woods take some little piece 
of the forest into their hands to play with by the way, which 
they leave, either intentionally or accidentally. One has peeled 
a willow wand, woven it into a ring, and dropped it on my table. 
I could always tell if visitors had called in my absence, either 
by the bended twigs or grass, or the print of their shoes, and 

1 Walden, chapter v. 



450 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

generally of what sex or age or quality they were by some slight 
trace left, as a flower dropped, or a bunch of grass plucked and 
thrown away, even as far off as the railroad, half a mile distant, 
or by the lingering odor of a cigar or pipe. Nay, I was frequently 
notified of the passage of a traveller along the highway sixty 
rods off by the scent of his pipe. 

There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon 
is never quite at our elbows. The thick wood is not just at our 
door, nor the pond, but somewhat is always clearing, familiar 
and worn by us, appropriated and fenced in some way, and 
reclaimed from Nature. For what reason have I this vast range 
and circuit, some square miles of unfrequented forest, for my 
privacy, abandoned to me by men? My nearest neighbor is a 
mile distant, and no house is visible from any place but the 
hill-tops within half a mile of my own. I have my horizon 
bounded by woods all to myself; a distant view of the railroad 
where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the fence 
which skirts the woodland road on the other. But for the most 
part it is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much 
Asia or Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own sun 
and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself. At night 
there was never a traveller passed my house, or knocked at my 
door, more than if I were the first or last man; unless it were in 
the spring, when at long intervals some came from the village 
to fish for pouts, — they plainly fished much more in the 
Walden Pond of their own natures, and baited their hooks 
with darkness, — but they soon retreated, usually with light 
baskets, and left "the world to darkness and to me," and the 
black kernel of the night was never profaned by any human 
neighborhood. I believe that men are generally still a little 
afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and 
Christianity and candles have been introduced. 

Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, 
the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in 
any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most 
melancholy man. There can be no very black melancholy to 
him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still. 
There was never yet such a storm but it was yEolian music to 
a healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a 
simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the 



SOLITUDE 451 

friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a 
burden to me. The gentle rain which waters my beans and 
keeps me in the house to-day is not drear and melancholy, but 
good for me too. Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of 
far more worth than my hoeing. If it should continue so long 
as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the pota- 
toes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass on the 
uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me. 
Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men, it seems 
as if I were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any 
deserts that I am conscious of; as if I had a warrant and surety 
at their hands which my fellows have not, and were especially 
guided and guarded. I do not flatter myself, but if it be possi- 
ble they flatter me. I have never felt lonesome, or in the least 
oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few 
weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted 
if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene 
and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But 
I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my 
mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery.' In the midst of a 
gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly 
sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the 
very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight 
around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all 
at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied 
advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have 
never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded 
and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so dis- 
tinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, 
even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, 
and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not 
a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be 
strange to me again. — 

" Mourning untimely consumes the sad ; 
Few are their days in the land of the living, 
Beautiful daughter of Toscar." x 

Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain- 
storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for 

1 A metrical version of Ossian. 



452 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless 
roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long eve- 
ning in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold 
themselves. In those driving northeast rains which tried the 
village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop and 
pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind my 
door in my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly 
enjoyed its protection. In one heavy thundershower the light- 
ning struck a large pitch pine across the pond, making a very 
conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove from top to 
bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches wide, as 
you would groove a walking-stick. I passed it again the other 
day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding that 
mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resist- 
less bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago. 
Men frequently say to me, "I should think you would feel lone- 
some down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and 
snowy days and nights especially." I am tempted to reply to 
such, — This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in I 
space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant 
inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be 
appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? 
is not our planet in the Milky Way? This which you put seems 
to me not to be the most important question. What sort of 
space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes 
him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can 
bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we 
want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the 
depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the 
school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, 1 or the Five Points, 2 
where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our 
life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, 
as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in 
that direction. This will vary with different natures, but this 
is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar. ... I one eve- 
ning overtook one of my townsmen, who has accumulated what 
is called "a handsome property," — though I never got a, fair 
view of it, — on the Walden road, driving a pair of cattle to 
market, who inquired of me how I could bring my mind to give 
1 In Boston. 2 In New York. 



SOLITUDE 453 

up so many of the comforts of life. I answered that I was very 
sure I liked it passably well ; I was not joking. And so I went 
home to my bed, and left him to pick his way through the dark- 
ness and the mud to Brighton, — or Bright-town, — which 
place he would reach some time in the morning. 

Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man 
makes indifferent all times and places. The place where that 
may occur is always the same, and indescribably pleasant to 
all our senses. For the most part we allow only outlying and 
transient circumstances to make our occasions. They are, in 
fact, the cause of our distraction. Nearest to all things is that 
power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws 
are continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman 
whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but 
the workman whose work we are. 

"How vast and profound is the influence of the subtile 
powers of Heaven and of Earth!" 

" We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them ; we seek 
to hear them, and we do not hear them; identified with the 
substance of things, they cannot be separated from them." 

"They cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify 
their hearts, and clothe themselves in their holiday garments 
to offer sacrifices and oblations to their ancestors. It is an ocean 
of subtile intelligences. They are everywhere, above us, on our 
left, on our right; they environ us on all sides." 

We are the subjects of an experiment which is not a little 
interesting to me. Can we not do without the society of our 
gossips a little while under these circumstances, — have our 
own thoughts to cheer us? Confucius says truly, "Virtue does 
not remain as an abandoned orphan; it must of necessity have 
neighbors." 

With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. 
By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from 
actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, 
go by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. 
I may be either the driftwood in the stream, or Indra in the sky 
looking down on it. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibi- 
tion; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an actual 
event which appears to concern me much more. I only know 
myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts 



454 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which 
I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However 
intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criti- 
cism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but 
spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that 
is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the trag- 
edy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of 
fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was con- 
cerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors 
and friends sometimes. 

I rind it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. 
To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and 
dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion 
that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most 
part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we 
stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always 
alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the 
miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. 
The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of 
Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervis in the desert. The 
farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing 
or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; 
but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room 
alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can 
"see the folks," and recreate, and, as he thinks, remunerate 
himself for his day's solitude; and hence he wonders how the 
student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day 
without ennui and " the blues " ; but he does not realize that the 
student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and 
chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks 
the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it 
may be a more condensed form of it. 

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short 
intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for 
each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each 
other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We 
have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and 
politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we 
need not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at 
the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick 



SOLITUDE 455 

and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, 
and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. 
Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important 
and hearty communications. Consider the girls in a factory, 
— never alone, hardly in their dreams. It would be better 
if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as where 
I live. The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should 
touch him. 

I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine 
and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was re- 
lieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily 
weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which 
he believed to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental 
health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a like 
but more normal and natural society, and come to know that 
we are never alone. 

I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the 
morning, when nobody calls. Let me suggest a few comparisons, 
that some one may convey an idea of my situation. I am no 
more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or 
than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, 
I pray? And yet it has not the blue devils, but the blue angels 
in it, in the azure tint of its waters. The sun is alone, except in 
thick weather, when there sometimes appear to be two, but 
one is a mock sun. God is alone, — but the devil, he is far from 
being alone ; he sees a great deal of company ; he is legion. I am 
no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, 
or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a humblebee. I am no 
more lonely than the Mill Brook, 1 or a weathercock, or the 
north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January 
thaw, or the first spider in a new house. 

I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the 
snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old 
settler and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug 
Walden Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods; 
who tells me stories of old time and of new eternity; and be- 
tween us we manage to pass a cheerful evening with social 
mirth and pleasant views of things, even without apples or 
cider, — a most wise and humorous friend, whom I love much, 
1 A Concord brook. 



456 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

who keeps himself more secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley, 1 
and though he is thought to be dead, none can show where he 
is buried. 2 An elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighborhood, 
invisible to most persons, in whose odorous herb garden I love 
to stroll sometimes, gathering simples and listening to her 
fables; for she has a genius of unequalled fertility, and her 
memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell 
me the original of every fable, and on what fact every one is 
founded, for the incidents occurred when she was young. A 
ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in all weathers and 
seasons, and is likely to outlive all her children yet. 3 

The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature, — 
of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter, — such 
health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy 
have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected, 
and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds would sigh hu- 
manely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their 
leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should 
ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with 
the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself? 

What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented? 
Not my or thy great-grandfather's, but our great-grandmother 
Nature's universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she 
has kept herself young always, outlived so many old Parrs 4 in 
her day, and fed her health with their decaying fatness. For 
my panacea, instead of one of those quack vials of a mixture 
dipped from Acheron and the Dead Sea, which come out of 
those long shallow black-schooner looking wagons which we 
sometimes see made to carry bottles, let me have a draught of 
undiluted morning air. Morning air! If men will not drink of 
this at the fountain-head of the day, why, then, we must even 
bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those 
who have lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this 
world. But remember, it will not keep quite till noonday even 
in the coolest cellar, but drive out the stopples long ere that 
and follow westward the steps of Aurora. I am no worshipper 

. * Regicides in hiding after the Restoration of 1660. 

2 Doubtless Pan. 3 Dame Nature. 

4 Thomas Parr, who died in 1635, was reported to have attained the age of 
152 years. 



CONCLUSION OF "WALDEN" 457 

of Hygeia, who was the daughter of that old herb-doctor 
^Esculapius, and who is represented on monuments holding a 
serpent in one hand, and in the other a cup out of which the 
serpent sometimes drinks; but rather of Hebe, cup-bearer to 
Jupiter, who was the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce, 1 and 
who had the power of restoring gods and men to the vigor of 
youth. She was probably the only thoroughly sound-condi- 
tioned, healthy, and robust young lady that ever walked the 
globe, and wherever she came it was spring. 



CONCLUSION OF "WALDEN" 2 

To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air 
and scenery. Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The 
buckeye does not grow in New England, and the mockingbird 
is rarely heard here. The wild goose is more of a cosmopolite 
than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the 
Ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern bayou. 
Even the bison, to some extent, keeps pace with the seasons, 
cropping the pastures of the Colorado only till a greener and 
sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowstone. Yet we think 
that if rail fences are pulled down, and stone walls piled up on 
our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fates 
decided. If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you cannot go 
to Tierra del Fuego this summer : but you may go to the land of 
infernal fire nevertheless. The universe is wider than our views 
of it. 

Yet we should oftener look over the tafferel of our craft, like 
curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors 
picking oakum. The other side of the globe is but the home of 
our correspondent. Our voyaging is only great-circle sailing, 3 
and the doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely. One 
hastens to southern Africa to chase the giraffe; but surely that 
is not the game he would be after. How long, pray, would a 
man hunt giraffes if he could? Snipes and woodcocks also may 

1 According to some accounts, the birth of Hebe was the consequence of Juno's 
having eaten freely of wild lettuce. 

2 W aid en, chapter xvm. 

3 Travelling over the curved surface of the earth on such a course as to traverse 
the shortest distance between two points. 



458 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

afford rare sport; but I trust it would be nobler game to shoot 
one's self. — 

"Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find 
A thousand regions in your mind 
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be 
Expert in home-cosmography." 

What does Africa, — what does the West stand for? Is not 
our own interior white on the chart? black though it may 
prove, like the coast, when discovered. Is it the source of the 
Nile, or the Niger, or the Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage 
around this continent, that we would rind? Are these the 
problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin 1 the only- 
man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him? 
Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the 
Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher, of your own 
streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes, — with 
shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be neces- 
sary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were pre- 
served meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a 
Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, 
opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man 
is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the 
Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some 
can be patriotic who have no se//-respect, and sacrifice the 
greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, 
but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate 
their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads. What was 
the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, 2 with all 
its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact 
that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which 
every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, 
but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through 
cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five 
hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore 
the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being 
alone. — 

1 Sir John Franklin, the explorer, who was lost in the Arctic Ocean in 1847. 
Of the many relief ships sent in search of him, two were fitted out by Henry 
Grinnell, of New York. 

2 Conducted, in 1838-42, by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes. 



CONCLUSION OF "WALDEN" ; 459 

"Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos. 
Plus habet hie vitae, plus habet ille viae." 

Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians. 
I have more of God, they more of the road. 

It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the 
cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and 
you may perhaps find some "Symmes' Hole" by which to get 
at the inside at last. 1 England and France, Spain and Portugal, 
Gold Coast and Slave Coast, all front on this private sea; but 
no bark from them has ventured out of sight of land, though 
it is without doubt the direct way to India. If you would learn 
to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations, 
if you would travel farther than all travellers, be naturalized in 
all climes, and cause the Sphinx to dash her head against a 
stone, even obey the precept of the old philosopher, and 
Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve. 
Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards that 
run away and enlist. Start now on that farthest western way, 
which does not pause at the Mississippi or the Pacific, nor con- 
duct toward a worn-out China or Japan, but leads on direct, 
a tangent to this sphere, summer and winter, day and night, 
sun down, moon down, and at last earth down too. 

It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery "to ascer- 
tain what degree of resolution was necessary in order to place 
one's self in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of soci- 
ety." He declared that "a soldier who rights in the ranks does 
not require half so much courage as a foot-pad," — "that 
honor and religion have never stood in the way of a well- 
considered and a firm resolve." This was manly, as the world 
goes; and yet it was idle, if not desperate. A saner man would 
have found himself often enough "in formal opposition" to 
what are deemed "the most sacred laws of society," through 
obedience to yet more sacred laws, and so have tested his reso- 
lution without going out of his way. It is not for a man to put 
himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself 
in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the 
laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a 
just government, if he should chance to meet with such. 

1 John Cleves Symmes, a naval captain in the War of 1812, published the 
theory that the earth is hollow, is open at the poles, and is habitable within. 



4 6o HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Per- 
haps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and 
could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable 
how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and 
make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week 
before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and 
though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite dis- 
tinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and 
so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and 
impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the 
mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the high- 
ways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conform- 
ity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go 
before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could 
best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to 
go below now. 

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one ad- 
vances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors 
to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a suc- 
cess unexpected in common hours. He will put some things- 
behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and 
more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and 
within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his 
favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license 
of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his 
life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and soli- 
tude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness 
weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need 
not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foun- 
dations under them. 

It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, 
that you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither 
men nor toadstools grow so. As if that were important, and 
there were not enough to understand you without them. As if 
Nature could support but one order of understandings, could 
not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as well as creep- 
ing things, and hish and whoa, which Bright 1 can understand, 
were the best English. As if there were safety in stupidity 
alone. I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extravagant 
1 A favorite name for an ox or a horse. 



CONCLUSION OF "WALDEN" 461 

enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits 
of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of 
which I have been convinced. Extravagance! it depends on 
how you are yarded. The migrating buffalo, which seeks new 
pastures in another latitude, is not extravagant like the cow 
which kicks over the pail, leaps the cowyard fence, and runs 
after her calf, in milking time. I desire to speak somewhere 
without bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in 
their waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exag- 
gerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression. 
Who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should 
speak extravagantly any more forever? In view of the future 
or possible, we should live quite laxly and undefined in front, 
our outlines dim and misty on that side; as our shadows reveal 
an insensible perspiration toward the sun. The volatile truth 
of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the 
residual statement. Their truth is instantly translated; its lit- 
eral monument alone remains. The words which express our 
faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and 
fragrant like frankincense to superior natures. 

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and 
praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the 
sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring. Sometimes 
we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half-witted 
with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part 
of their wit. Some would find fault with the morning red, if 
they ever got up early enough. "They pretend," as I hear, 
"that the verses of Kabir 1 have four different senses; illusion, 
spirit, intellect, and the exoteric doctrine of the Vedas"; 
but in this part of the world it is considered a ground for 
complaint if a man's writings admit of more than one inter- 
pretation. While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, 
will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so 
much more widely and fatally? 

I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity, but I 
should be proud if no more fatal fault were found with my 
pages on this score than was found with the Walden ice. 
Southern customers objected to its blue color, which is the 
evidence of its purity, as if it were muddy, and preferred the 
1 A Hindoo religious reformer (1488-1512). 



462 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

Cambridge ice, which is white, but tastes of weeds. The purity 
men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not like 
the azure ether beyond. 

Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and mod- 
erns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the an- 
cients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the 
purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man 
go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, 
and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind 
his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made. 

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in 
such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with 
his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different 
drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however 
measured or far away. It is not important that he should 
mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his 
spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were 
made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can sub- 
stitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. Shall 
we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves, 
though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the true 
ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not? 

There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed 
to strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to 
make a staff. Having considered . that in an imperfect work 
time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not 
enter, he said to himself, It shall be perfect in all respects, 
though I should do nothing else in my life. He proceeded in- 
stantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that it should not 
be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched for and 
rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, 
for they grew old in their works and died, but he grew not older 
by a moment. His singleness of purpose and resolution, and 
his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with 
perennial youth. As he made no compromise with Time, Time 
kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he 
could not overcome him. Before he had found a stock in all 
respects suitable the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he 
sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Before he had given 
it the proper shape the dynasty of the Candahars was at an 



CONCLUSION OF " WALDEN " 463 

end, and with the point of the stick he wrote the name of the 
last of that race in the sand, and then resumed his work. By 
the tipie he had smoothed and polished the staff Kalpa 1 was 
no longer the pole-star; and ere he had put on the ferule and 
the head adorned with precious stones, Brahma had awoke and 
slumbered many times. But why do I stay to mention these 
things? When the finishing stroke was put to his work, it 
suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into 
the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new 
system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions; 
in which, though the old cities and dynasties had passed away, 
fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places. And now 
he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for 
him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion, 
and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a single 
scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame 
the tinder of a mortal brain. The material was pure, and his 
art was pure; how could the result be other than wonderful? 

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well 
at last as the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part, 
we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an 
infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves 
into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is 
doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we regard only 
the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not what 
you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde, 
the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had any- 
thing to say. " Tell the tailors," said he, " to remember to make 
a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch." His 
companion's prayer is forgotten. 

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it 
and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks 
poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults 
even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may per- 
haps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a 
poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of 
the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the 
snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see 
but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as 
1 A day of Brahma, or 4,320,000,000 years. 



464 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

cheering thoughts, as in a palace. The town's poor seem to me 
often to live the most independent lives of any. Maybe they 
are simply great enough to receive without misgiving. Most 
think that they are above being supported by the town; but it 
oftener happens that they are not above supporting them- 
selves by dishonest means, which should be more disreputable. 
Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble 
yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. 
Turn the old ; return to them. Things do not change; we change. 
Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that 
you do not want society. If I were confined to a corner of a 
garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as 
large to me while I had my thoughts about me. The philosopher 
said: "From an army of three divisions one can take away its 
general, and put it in disorder; from the man the most abject 
and vulgar one cannot take away his thought." Do not seek so 
anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influ- 
ences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like dark- 
ness reveals the heavenly lights. The shadows of poverty and 
meanness gather around us, "and lo! creation widens to our 
view." We are often reminded that if there were bestowed on 
us the wealth of Croesus, our aims must still be the same, and 
our means essentially the same. Moreover, if you are restricted 
in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy books and news- 
papers, for instance, you are but confined to the most signifi- 
cant and vital experiences ; you are compelled to deal with the 
material which yields the most sugar and the most starch. It is 
life near the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended from 
being a trifler. No man loses ever on a lower level by magna- 
nimity on a higher. Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities 
only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul. 
I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition 
was poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of 
my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum 
from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries. My neigh- 
bors tell me of their adventures with famous gentlemen and 
ladies, what notabilities they met at the dinner-table; but I am 
no more interested in such things than in the contents of the 
Daily Times. The interest and the conversation are about 
costume and manners chiefly; but a goose is a goose still, dress 



CONCLUSION OF " WALDEN » 465 

it as you will. They tell me of California and Texas, of England 
and the Indies, of the Hon. Mr. of Georgia or of Massa- 
chusetts, all transient and fleeting phenomena, till I am ready 
to leap from their court-yard like the Mameluke bey. 1 I delight 
to come to my bearings, — not walk in procession with pomp 
and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk even with the 
Builder of the universe, if I may, — not to live in this restless, 
nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit 
thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men celebrating? They 
are all on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a 
speech from somebody. God is only the president of the day, 
and Webster is his orator. I love to weigh, to settle, to gravi- 
tate toward that which most strongly and rightfully attracts 
me ; — not hang by the beam of the scale and try to weigh less, 
— not suppose a case, but take the case that is; to travel the 
only path I can, and that on which no power can resist me. It 
affords me no satisfaction to commence to spring an arch 
before I have got a solid foundation. Let us not play at kittly- 
benders. 2 There is a solid bottom everywhere. We read that 
the traveller asked the boy if the swamp before him had a hard 
bottom. The boy replied that it had. But presently the 
traveller's horse sank in up to the girths, and he observed to 
the boy, " I thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom." 
"So it has," answered the latter," but you have not got half- 
way to it yet." So it is with the bogs and quicksands of society ; 
but he is an old boy that knows it. Only what is thought, said, 
or done at a certain rare coincidence is good. I would not be 
one of those who will foolishly drive a nail into mere lath and 
plastering; such a deed would keep me awake nights. Give me 
a hammer, and let me ieel for the furring. Do not depend on 
the putty. Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that 
you can wake up in the night and think of your work with sat- 
isfaction, — a work at which you would not be ashamed to 
invoke the Muse. So will help you God, and so only. Every 
nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the 
universe, you carrying on the work. 

1 A member of the Mamelukes, who, when they were ambushed by the vice- 
roy of Egypt at the citadel of Cairo in 1811, is said to have escaped by forcing his 
horse to leap from the ramparts. 

2 The sport of running over thin, bending ice. (U.S., colloq.) 



466 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. 
I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, 
and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; 
and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board. The 
hospitality was as cold as the ices. I thought that there was no 
need of ice to freeze them. They talked to me of the age of the 
wine and the fame of the vintage; but I thought of an older, a 
newer, and purer wine, of a more glorious vintage, which they 
had not got, and could not buy. The style, the house and 
grounds and "entertainment" pass for nothing with me. I 
called on the king, but he made me wait in his hall, and con- 
ducted like a man incapacitated for hospitality. There was a 
man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow tree. His man- 
ners were truly regal. I should have done better had I called 
on him. 

How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and 
musty virtues, which any work would make impertinent? As 
if one were to begin the day with long-suffering, and hire a man 
to hoe his potatoes; and in the afternoon go forth to practise 
Christian meekness and charity with goodness aforethought! 
Consider the China pride and stagnant self-complacency of 
mankind. This generation inclines a little to congratulate itself 
on being the last of an illustrious line; and in Boston and Lon- 
don and Paris and Rome, thinking of its long descent, it speaks 
of its progress in art and science and literature with satisfaction. 
There are the Records of the Philosophical Societies, and the 
public Eulogies of Great Men I It is the good Adam contem- 
plating his own virtue. "Yes, we have done great deeds, and 
sung divine songs, which shall never die," — that is, as long 
as we can remember them. The learned societies and great 
men of Assyria, — where are they? What youthful philoso- 
phers and experimentalists we are ! There is not one of my read- 
ers who has yet lived a whole human life. These may be but 
the spring months in the life of the race. If* we have had the 
seven-years' itch, we have not seen the seventeen-year locust 
yet in Concord. We are acquainted with a mere pellicle of the 
globe on which we live. Most have not delved six feet beneath 
the surface, nor leaped as many above it. We know not where 
we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet 
we esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the 



CONCLUSION OF "WALDEN" 467 

surface. Truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits ! 
As I stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles on 
the forest floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself from my 
sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts, 
and hide its head from me who might, perhaps, be its bene- 
factor, and impart to its race some cheering information, I am 
reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands 
over me the human insect. 

There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and 
yet we tolerate incredible dulness. I need only suggest what 
kind of sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened 
countries. There are such words as joy and sorrow, but they 
are only the burden of a psalm, sung with a nasal twang, while 
we believe in the ordinary and mean. We think that we can 
change our clothes only. It is said that the British Empire is 
very large and respectable, and that the United States are a 
first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls 
behind every man which can float the British Empire like a 
chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind. Who knows what 
sort of seventeen-year locust will next come out of the ground? 
The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that 
of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine. 

The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this 
year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched 
uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown 
out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we 
dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently 
washed, before science began to record its freshets. Every one 
has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New Eng- 
land, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry 
leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a 
farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and after- 
ward in Massachusetts, — from an egg deposited in the living 
tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the 
annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for 
several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who 
does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality 
strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful 
and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many 
concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, 



468 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, 
which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its 
well-seasoned tomb, — heard perchance gnawing out now for 
years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the 
festive board, — may unexpectedly come forth from amidst 
society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its 
perfect summer life at last! 

I do not say that John or Jonathan 1 will realize all this; but 
such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time 
can never make to dawn. The light which puts Out our eyes is 
darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. 
There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star. 

LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE 2 

At a lyceum, not long since, I felt that the lecturer had 
chosen a theme too foreign to himself, and so failed to interest 
me as much as he might have done. He described things not 
in or near to his heart, but toward his extremities and super- 
ficies. There was, in this sense, no truly central or centralizing 
thought in the lecture. I would have had him deal with his 
privatest experience, as the poet does. The greatest compli- 
ment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what 
I thought, and attended to my answer. I am surprised, as well 
as delighted, when this happens, it is such a rare use he would 
make of me, as if he were acquainted with the tool. Commonly, 
if men want anything of me, it is only to know haw many 
acres I make of their land, — since I am a surveyor, — or, at 
most, what trivial news I have burdened myself with. They 
never will go to law for my meat; they prefer the shell. A man 
once came a considerable distance to ask me to lecture on 
Slavery; but on conversing with him, I found that he and his 
clique expected seven eighths of the lecture to be theirs, and 
only one eighth mine; so I declined. I take it for granted, when 
I am invited to lecture anywhere, — for I have had a little 
experience in that business, — that there is a desire to hear 
what i" think on some subject, though I may be the greatest fool 

1 John Bull and Brother Jonathan. 

2 A posthumous paper, first published in the Atlantic Monthly, October, 1863; 
now included in Miscellanies. 



LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE 469 

in the country, — a and not that I should say pleasant things 
merely, or such as the audience will assent to; and I resolve, 
accordingly, that I will give them a strong dose of myself. They 
have sent for me, and engaged to pay for me, and I am deter- 
mined that they shall have me, though I bore them beyond all 
precedent. 

So now I would say something similar to you, my readers. 
Since you are my readers, and I have not been much of a travel- 
ler, I will not talk about people a thousand miles off, but. come 
as near home as I can. As the time is short, I will leave out all 
the flattery, and retain all the criticism. 

Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives. 

This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! 
I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the loco- 
motive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It 
would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is 
nothing but work, work, work. I cannot easily buy a blank- 
book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars 
and cents. An Irishman, seeing me making a minute in the 
fields, took it for granted that I was calculating my wages. If 
a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made 
a cripple for life, or scared out of his wits by the Indians, it 
is regretted chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for — 
business! I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more 
opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this 
incessant business. 

There is a coarse and boisterous money-making fellow in 
the outskirts of our town, who is going to build a bank-wall 
under the hill along the edge of his meadow. The powers have 
put this into his head to keep him out of mischief, and he 
wishes me to spend three weeks digging there with him. The 
result will be that he will perhaps get some more money to 
hoard, and leave for his heirs to spend foolishly. If I do this, 
most will commend me as an industrious and hard-working 
man; but if I choose to devote myself to certain labors which 
yield more real profit, though but little money, they may be 
inclined to look on me as an idler. Nevertheless, as I do not 
need the police of meaningless labor to regulate me, and do not 
see anything absolutely praiseworthy in this fellow's under- 
taking any more than in many an enterprise of our own or 



470 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

foreign governments, however amusing it may be to him or 
them, I prefer to finish my education at a different school. 

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, 
he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends 
his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and 
making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industri- 
ous and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its 
forests but to cut them down! 

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ 
them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing 
them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But 
many are no more worthily employed now. For instance: just 
after sunrise, one summer morning, I noticed one of my neigh- 
bors walking beside his team, which was slowly drawing a 
heavy hewn stone swung under the axle, surrounded by an 
atmosphere of industry, — his day's work begun, — his brow 
commenced to sweat, — a reproach to all sluggards and idlers, 

— pausing abreast the shoulders of his oxen, and half turning 
round with a flourish of his merciful whip, while they gained 
their length on him. And I thought, Such is the labor which 
the American Congress exists to protect, — honest, manly toil, 

— honest as the day is long, — that makes his bread taste 
sweet, and keeps society sweet, — which all men respect and 
have consecrated; one of the sacred band, doing the needful 
but irksome drudgery. Indeed, I felt a slight reproach, because 
I observed this from a window, and was not abroad and stirring 
about a similar business. The day went by, and at evening I 
passed the yard of another neighbor, who keeps many servants, 
and spends much money foolishly, while he adds nothing to the 
common stock, and there I saw the stone of the morning lying 
beside a whimsical structure intended to adorn this Lord 
Timothy Dexter's premises, and the dignity forthwith de- 
parted from the teamster's labor, in my eyes. In my opinion, 
the sun was made to light worthier toil than this. I may add 
that his employer has since run off, in debt to a good part of 
the town, and, after passing through Chancery, has settled 
somewhere else, there to become once more a patron of the arts. 

The ways by which you may get money almost without 
exception lead downward. To have done anything by which 
you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. 



LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE 471 

If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer 
pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself: If you would get 
money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is 
to go down perpendicularly. Those services which the com- 
munity will most readily pay for, it is most disagreeable to 
render. You are paid for being something less than a man. The 
State does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. 
Even the poet-laureate would rather not have to celebrate the 
accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; 
and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to 
gauge that very pipe. As for my own business, even that kind 
of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my em- 
ployers do not want. They would prefer that I should do my 
work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. When I 
observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer 
commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is 
most correct. I once invented a rule for measuring cord-wood, 
and tried to introduce it in Boston; but the measurer there told 
me that the sellers did not wish to have their wood measured 
correctly, — that he was already too accurate for them, and 
therefore they commonly got their wood measured in Charles- 
town before crossing the bridge. 

The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to 
get " a good job," but to perform well a certain work; and, even 
in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay 
its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were 
working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scien- 
tific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your 
work for money, but him who does it for love of it. 

It is remarkable that there are few men so well employed, 
so much to their minds, but that a little money or fame would 
commonly buy them off from their present pursuit. I see ad- 
vertisements for active young men, as if activity were the whole 
of a young man's capital. Yet I have been surprised when one 
has with confidence proposed to me, a grown man, to embark 
in some enterprise of his, as if I had absolutely nothing to do, 
my life having been a complete failure hitherto. What a doubt- 
ful compliment this to pay me! As if he had met me halfway 
across the ocean beating up against the wind, but bound no- 
where, and proposed to me to go along with him ! If I did, what 



472 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 



do you think the underwriters would say? No, no! I am not 
without employment at this stage of the voyage. To tell the 
truth, I saw an advertisement for able-bodied seamen, when I 
was a boy, sauntering in my native port, and as soon as I came 
of age I embarked: 

The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. 
You may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you 
cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his 
own business. An efficient and valuable man does what he can, 
whether the community pay him for it or not. The inefficient 
offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder, and are forever 
expecting to be put into office. One would suppose that they 
were rarely disappointed. 

Perhaps I am more than usually jealous with respect to my 
freedom. I feel that my connection with and obligation to 
society are still very slight and transient. Those slight labors 
which afford me a livelihood, and by which it is allowed that I 
am to some extent serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet 
commonly a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that 
they are a necessity. So far I am successful. But I foresee that 
if my wants should be much increased, the labor required to 
supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both 
my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, 
I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living 
for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess 
of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very indus- 
trious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal 
blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life 
getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. 
The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as 
a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. 
You must get your living by loving. 1 But as it is said of the 
merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail, so the life of 
men generally, tried by this standard, is a failure, and bank- 
ruptcy may be surely prophesied. 

Merely to come into the world the heir of a fortune is not 
to be born, but to be still-born, rather. To be supported by 
the charity of friends, or a government-pension, — provided 
you continue to breathe, — by whatever fine synonyms you 

1 Living? 



LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE 473 

describe these relations, is to go into the almshouse. On Sun- 
days the poor debtor goes to church to take an account of 
stock, and finds, of course, that his outgoes have been greater 
than his income. In the Catholic Church, especially, they go 
into Chancery, make a clean confession, give up all, and think 
to start again. Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about 
the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up. 

As for the comparative demand which men make on life, it 
is an important difference between two, that the one is satisfied 
with a level success, that his marks can all be hit by point- 
blank shots, but the other, however low and unsuccessful his 
life may be, constantly elevates his aim, though at a very slight 
angle to the horizon. I should much rather be the last man, — 
though, as the Orientals say, "Greatness doth not approach 
him who is forever looking down ; and all those who are looking 
high are growing poor." 

It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remem- 
bered written on the subject of getting a living; how to make 
getting a living not merely honest and honorable, but alto- 
gether inviting and glorious; for if getting a living is not so, then 
living is not. One would think, from looking at literature, that 
this question had never disturbed a solitary individual's mus- 
ings. Is it that men are too much disgusted with their experi- 
ence to speak of it? The lesson of value which money teaches, 
which the Author of the Universe has taken so much pains to 
teach us, we are inclined to skip altogether. As for the means 
of living, it is wonderful how indifferent men of all classes are 
about it, even reformers, so called, — whether they inherit, 
or earn, or steal it. I think that Society has done nothing for us 
in this respect, or at least has undone what she has done. Cold 
and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those meth- 
ods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off. 

The title wise is, for the most part, falsely applied. How can 
one be a wise man, if he does not know any better how to live 
than other men? — if he is only more cunning and intellectu- 
ally subtle? Does Wisdom work in a treadmill? or does she 
teach how to succeed by her example? Is there any such thing 
as wisdom not applied to life? Is she merely the miller who 
grinds the finest logic? It is pertinent to ask if Plato got his 
living in a better way or more successfully than his contempo- 



474 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

raries, — or did he succumb to the difficulties of life like other 
men? Did he seem to prevail over some of them merely by in- 
difference, or by assuming grand airs? or find it easier to live, 
because his aunt remembered him in her will? The ways in 
which most men get their living, that is, live, are mere make- 
shifts, and a shirking of the real business of life, — chiefly 
because they do not know, but partly because they do not 
mean, any better. 

The rush to California, for instance, and the attitude, not 
merely of merchants, but of philosophers and prophets, so 
called, in relation to it, reflect the greatest disgrace on mankind. 
That so many are ready to live by luck, and so get the means of 
commanding the labor of others less lucky, without contribut- 
ing any value to society! And that is called enterprise ! I know 
of no more startling development of the immorality of trade, 
and all the common modes of getting a living. The philosophy 
and poetry and religion of such a mankind are not worth the 
dust of a puff-ball. The hog that gets his living by rooting, 
stirring up the soil so, would be ashamed of such company. 
If I could command the wealth of all the worlds by lifting my 
finger, I would not pay such a price for it. Even Mahomet knew 
that God did not make this world in jest. It makes God to be 
a moneyed gentleman who scatters a handful of pennies in 
order to see mankind scramble for them. The world's raffle! 
A subsistence in the domains of Nature a thing to be raffled for! 
What a comment, what a satire, on our institutions! The con- 
clusion will be, that mankind will hang itself upon a tree. And 
have all the precepts in all the Bibles 1 taught men only this? 
and is the last and most admirable invention of the human race 
only an improved muck-rake? Is this the ground on which 
Orientals and Occidentals meet? Did God direct us so to get 
our living, digging where we never planted, — and He would, 
perchance, reward us with lumps of gold? 

God gave the righteous man a certificate entitling him to 
food and raiment, but the unrighteous man found a facsimile 
of the same in God's coffers, and appropriated it, and obtained 

1 "The reading which I love best is the scriptures of the several nations, 
though it happens that I am better acquainted with those of the Hindoos, the 
Chinese, and the Persians, than of the Hebrews, which I have come to last." (A 
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, p. 72.) 



LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE 475 

food and raiment like the former. It is one of the most exten- 
sive systems of counterfeiting that the world has seen. I did 
not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. I have 
seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so 
malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but 
not so much as a grain of wisdom. 

The gold-digger in the ravines of the mountains is as much 
a gambler as his fellow in the saloons of San Francisco. What 
difference does it make whether you shake dirt or shake dice? 
If you win, society is the loser. The gold-digger is the enemy of 
the honest laborer, whatever checks and compensations there 
may be. It is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to 
get your gold. So does the Devil work hard. The way of trans- 
gressors may be hard in many respects. The humblest observer 
who goes to the mines sees and says that gold-digging is of the 
character of a lottery; the gold thus obtained is not the same 
thing with the wages of honest toil. But, practically, he for- 
gets what he has seen, for he has seen only the fact, not the 
principle, and goes into trade there, that is, buys a ticket in 
what commonly proves another lottery, where the fact is not 
so obvious. 

After reading Howitt's account of the Australian gold- 
diggings one evening, I had in my mind's eye, all night, the 
numerous valleys, with their streams, all cut up with foul pits, 
from ten to one hundred feet deep, and half a dozen feet across, 
as close as they can be dug, and partly filled with water, — the 
locality to which men furiously rush to probe for their fortunes, 
— uncertain where they shall break ground, — not knowing 
but the gold is under their camp itself, — sometimes digging 
one hundred and sixty feet before they strike the vein, or then 
missing it by a foot, — turned into demons, and regardless of 
each others' rights, in their thirst for riches, — whole valleys, 
for thirty miles, suddenly honeycombed by the pits of the 
miners, so that even hundreds are drowned in them, — stand- 
ing in water, and covered with mud and clay, they work night 
and day, dying of exposure and disease. Having read this, and 
partly forgotten it, I was thinking, accidentally, of my own 
unsatisfactory life, doing as others do; and with that vision of 
the diggings still before me, I asked myself why I might not be 
washing some gold daily, though it were only the finest parti- 



476 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

cles, — why / might not sink a shaft down to the gold within 
me, and work that mine. There is a Ballarat, a Bendigo 1 for 
you, — what though it were a sulky-gully? At any rate, I 
might pursue some path, however solitary and narrow and 
crooked, in which I could walk with love and reverence. Wher- 
ever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own way 
in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road, though ord- 
inary travellers may see only a gap in the paling. His solitary 
path across-lots will turn out the higher way of the two. 

Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold 
were to be found in that direction; but that is to go to the very 
opposite extreme to where it lies. They go prospecting farther 
and farther away from the true lead, and are most unfortunate 
when they think themselves most successful. Is not our native 
soil auriferous? Does not a stream from the golden mountains 
flow through our native valley? and has not this for more than 
geologic ages been bringing down the shining particles and form- 
ing the nuggets for us? Yet, strange to tell, if a digger steal 
away, prospecting for this true gold, into the unexplored soli- 
tudes around us, there is no danger that any will dog his steps, 
and endeavor to supplant him. He may claim and undermine 
the whole valley even, both the cultivated and the uncultivated 
portions, his whole life long in peace, for no one will ever dis- 
pute his claim. They will not mind his cradles or his toms. He 
is not confined to a claim twelve feet square, as at Ballarat, 
but may mine anywhere, and wash the whole wide world in his 
torn. 

Howitt says of the man who found the great nugget which 
weighed twenty-eight pounds, at the Bendigo diggings in Aus- 
tralia: "He soon began to drink; got a horse, and rode all about, 
generally at full gallop, and, when he met people, called out to 
inquire if they knew who he was, and then kindly informed 
them that he was ' the bloody wretch that had found the nug- 
get.' At last he rode full speed against a tree, and nearly 
knocked his brains out." I think, however, there was no dan- 
ger of that, for he had already knocked his brains out against 
the nugget. Howitt adds, "He is a hopelessly ruined man." 
But he is a type of the class. They are all fast men. Hear some 
of the names of the places where they dig: "Jackass Flat," — 

1 Cities in Australia, near the gold mines. 



" LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE 477 

"Sheep's-Head Gully," — "Murderer's Bar," etc. Is there no 
satire in these names? Let them carry their ill-gotten wealth 
where they will, I am thinking it will still be "Jackass Flat," if 
not "Murderer's Bar," where they live. ■ 

The last resource of our energy has been the robbing of 
graveyards on the Isthmus of Darien, an enterprise which 
appears to be but in its infancy; for, according to late accounts, 
an act has passed its second reading in the legislature of New 
Granada, regulating this kind of mining; and a correspondent 
of the Tribune writes: "In the dry season, when the weather 
will permit of the country being properly prospected, no doubt 
other rich guacas [that is, graveyards] will be found." To emi- 
grants he says: "Do not come before December; take the 
Isthmus route in preference to the Boca del Toro one; bring no 
useless baggage, and do not cumber yourself with a tent; but a 
good pair of blankets will be necessary; a pick, shovel, and axe 
of good material will be almost all that is required": advice 
which might have been taken from the Burker's Guide. And 
he concludes with this line in italics and small capitals: "If you 
are doing well at home, stay there," which may fairly be inter- 
preted to mean, "If you are getting a good living by robbing 
graveyards at home, stay there." 

But why go to California for a text? She is the child of New 
England, bred at her own school and church. 

It is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so 
few moral teachers. The prophets are employed in excusing 
the ways of men. Most reverend seniors, the illuminati of the 
age, tell me, with a gracious, reminiscent smile, betwixt an 
aspiration and a shudder, not to be too tender about these 
things, — to lump all that, that is, make a lump of gold of it. 
The highest advice I have heard on these subjects was grovel- 
ing. The burden of it was, — It is not worth your while to 
undertake to reform the world in this particular. Do not ask 
how your bread is buttered; it will make you sick, if you do, — 
and the like. A man had better starve at once than lose his 
innocence in the process of getting his bread. If within the 
sophisticated man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he 
is but one of the Devil's angels. As we grow old, we live more 
coarsely, we relax a little in our disciplines, and, to some extent, 
cease to obey our finest instincts. But we should be fastidious 



478 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

to the extreme of sanity, disregarding the gibes of those who 
are more unfortunate than ourselves. 

In our science and philosophy, even, there is commonly no 
true and absolute account of things. The spirit of sect and 
bigotry has planted its hoof amid the stars. You have only to 
discuss the problem, whether the stars are inhabited or not, in 
order to discover it. Why must we daub the heavens as well 
as the earth? It was an unfortunate discovery that Dr. Kane 
was a Mason, and that Sir John Franklin was another. But it 
was a more cruel suggestion that possibly that was the reason 
why the former went in search of the latter. There is not a 
popular magazine in this country that would dare to print a 
child's thought on important subjects without comment. It 
must be submitted to the D.D.'s. I would it were the chicka- 
dee-dees. 

You come from attending the funeral of mankind to attend 
to a natural phenomenon. A little thought is sexton to all the 
world. 

I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and 
truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most with 
whom you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some 
institution in which they appear to hold stock, — that is, some 
particular, not universal, way of viewing things. They will 
continually thrust their own low roof, with its narrow sky- 
light, between you and the sky, when it is the unobstructed 
heavens you would view. Get out of the way with your cob- 
webs, wash your windows, I say! In some Lyceums they tell 
me that they have voted to exclude the subject of religion. 
But how do I know what their religion is, and when I am near 
to or far from it? I have walked into such an arena and done 
my best to make a clean breast of what religion I have experi- 
enced, and the audience never suspected what I was about. 
The lecture was as harmless as moonshine to them. Whereas, if 
I had read to them the biography of the greatest scamps in 
history, they might have thought that I had written the lives 
of the deacons of their church. Ordinarily, the inquiry is, 
Where did you come from? or, Where are you going? That was 
a more pertinent question which I overheard one of my audi- 
tors put to another once, — "What does he lecture for?" It 
made me quake in my shoes. 



LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE 479 

To speak impartially, the best men that I know are not 
serene, a world in themselves. For the most part, they dwell in 
forms, and flatter and study effect only more finely than the 
rest. We select granite for the underpinning of our houses and 
barns; we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest 
on an underpinning of granitic truth, the lowest primitive rock. 
Our sills are rotten. What stuff is the man made of who is not 
coexistent in our thought with the purest and subtilest truth? 
I often accuse my finest acquaintances of an immense frivolity; 
for, while there are manners and compliments we do not meet, 
we do not teach one another the lessons of honesty and sincer- 
ity that the brutes do, or of steadiness and solidity that the 
rocks do. The fault is commonly mutual, however; for we do 
not habitually demand any more of each other. 

That excitement about Kossuth, consider how character- 
istic, but superficial, it was! — only another kind of politics or 
dancing. Men were making speeches to him all over the coun- 
try, but each expressed only the thought, or the want of 
thought, of the multitude. No man stood on truth. They 
were merely banded together, as usual one leaning on another, 
and all together on nothing; as the Hindoos made the world 
rest on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise 
on a serpent, and had nothing to put under the serpent. For 
all fruit of that stir we have the Kossuth hat. 

Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordi- 
nary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases 
to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere 
gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which 
he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; 
and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our 
fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, 
and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go 
more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may 
depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the 
greatest number of letters proud of his extensive correspond- 
ence has not heard from himself this long while. 

I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a 
week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me 
that I have not dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, 
the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve 



4 8o HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

two masters. It requires more than a day's devotion to know 
and to possess the wealth of a day. 

r We may well be ashamed to tell what things we have read 
or heard in our day. I do not know why my news should be so 
trivial, — considering what one's dreams and expectations are, 
why the developments should be so paltry. The news we hear, 
for the most part, is not news to our genius. It is the stalest 
repetition. You are often tempted to ask why such stress is laid 
on a particular experience which you have had, — that, after 
twenty-five years, you should meet Hobbins, Registrar of 
Deeds, again on the sidewalk. Have you not budged an inch, 
then? Such is the daily news. Its facts appear to float in the 
atmosphere, insignificant as the sporules of fungi, and impinge 
on some neglected thallus, or surface of our minds, which 
affords a basis for them, and hence a parasitic growth. We 
should wash ourselves clean of such news. Of what conse- 
quence, though our planet explode, if there is no character 
involved in the explosion? In health we have not the least 
curiosity about such events. We do not live for idle amuse- 
ment. I would not run round a corner to see the world blow 
up. 

All summer, and far into the autumn, perchance, you un- 
consciously went by the newspapers and the news, and now 
you find it was because the morning and the evening were full 
of news to you. Your walks were full of incidents. You at- 
tended, not to the affairs of Europe, but to your own affairs 
in Massachusetts fields. If you chance to live and move and 
have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that 
make the news transpire, — thinner than the paper on which 
it is printed, — then these things will fill the world for you; but 
if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remem- 
ber nor be reminded of them. Really to see the sun rise or 
go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a universal fact, 
would preserve us sane forever. Nations! What are nations? 
Tartars, and Huns, and Chinamen ! Like insects, they swarm. 
The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is 
for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals 
that populate the world. Any man thinking may say with the 
Spirit of Lodin, — 



LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE 481 

"I look down from my height on nations, 
And they become ashes before me ; — 
Calm is my dwelling in the clouds; 
Pleasant are the great fields of my rest." 

Pray, let us live without being drawn by dogs, Esquimaux- 
fashion, tearing over hill and dale, and biting each other's ears. 

Not without a slight shudder at the danger, I often perceive 
how near I had come to admitting into my mind the details of 
some trivial affair, — the news of the street; and I am aston- 
ished to observe how willing men are to lumber their minds 
with such rubbish, — to permit idle rumors and incidents of the 
most insignificant kind to intrude on ground which should be 
sacred to thought. Shall the mind be a public arena, where the 
affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are 
discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself, — an hypae- 
thral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods? I find it so 
difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, 
that I hesitate to burden my attention with those which are 
insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such 
is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation. 
It is important to preserve the mind's chastity in this respect. 
Think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal 
court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very 
sanctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a 
very bar-room of the mind's inmost apartment, as if for so long 
the dust of the street had occupied us, — the very street itself, 
with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our 
thoughts' shrine! Would it not be an intellectual and moral 
suicide? When I have been compelled to sit spectator and 
auditor in a courtroom for some hours, and have seen my 
neighbors, who were not compelled, stealing in from time to 
time, and tiptoeing about with washed hands and faces, it has 
appeared to my mind's eye, that, when they took off their hats, 
their ears suddenly expanded into vast hoppers for sound, 
between which even their narrow heads were crowded. Like 
the vanes of windmills, they caught the broad but shallow 
stream of sound, which, after a few titillating gyrations in 
their coggy brains, passed out the other side. I wondered if, 
when they got home, they were as careful to wash their ears as 
before their hands and faces. It has seemed to me, at such a 



482 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

time, that the auditors and the witnesses, the jury and the 
counsel, the judge and the criminal at the bar, — if I may 
presume him guilty before he is convicted, — were all equally 
criminal, and a thunderbolt might be expected to descend and 
consume them all together. 

By all kinds of traps and signboards, threatening the extreme 
penalty of the divine law, exclude such trespassers from the 
only ground which can be sacred to you. It is so hard to forget 
what it is worse than useless to remember! If I am to be a 
thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain-brooks, the 
Parnassian streams, and not the town-sewers. There is inspira- 
tion, that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind 
from the courts of heaven. There is the profane and stale reve- 
lation of the bar-room and the police court. The same ear is 
fitted to receive both communications. Only the character of 
the hearer determines to which it shall be open, and to which 
closed. I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned 
by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our 
thoughts shall be tinged with triviality. Our very intellect shall 
be macadamized, as it were, — its foundation broken into frag- 
ments for the wheels of travel to roll over; and if you would 
know what will make the most durable pavement, surpassing 
rolled stones, spruce blocks, and asphaltum, you have only to 
look into some of our minds which have been subjected to this 
treatment so long. 

If we have thus desecrated ourselves, — as who has not? — 
the remedy will be by wariness and devotion to reconsecrate 
ourselves, and make once more a fane of the mind. We should 
treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous 
children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects 
and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the 
Times. Read the Eternities. Conventionalities are at length 
as bad as impurities. Even the facts of science may dust the 
mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced each 
morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and 
living truth. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in 
flashes of light from heaven. Yes, every thought that passes 
through the mind helps to wear and tear it, and to deepen the 
ruts, which, as in the streets of Pompeii, evince how much it 
has been used. How many things there are concerning which 



LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE 483 

we might well deliberate whether we had better know them, — 
had better let their peddling-carts be driven, even at the slow- 
est trot or walk, over that bridge of glorious span by which 
we trust to pass at last from the farthest brink of time to the 
nearest shore of eternity ! Have we no culture, no refinement, 
— but skill only to live coarsely and serve the Devil? — to 
acquire a little worldly wealth, or fame, or liberty, and make 
a false show with it, as if we were all husk and shell, with no 
tender and living kernel to us? Shall our institutions be like 
those chestnut-burs which contain abortive nuts, perfect only 
to prick the fingers? 

America is said to be the arena on which the battle of free- 
dom is to be fought; but surely it cannot be freedom in a merely 
political sense that is meant. Even if we grant that the Amer- 
ican has freed himself from a political tyrant, he is still the 
slave of an economical and moral tyrant. Now that the repub- 
lic — the respublica — has been settled, it is time to look after 
the res-privata, — the private state, — to see, as the Roman 
senate charged its consuls, "ne quid res-VRWATA detrimenti 
caper et" that the private state receive no detriment. 

Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free 
from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice? 
What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the 
value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral free- 
dom? Is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of 
which we boast? We are a nation of politicians, concerned 
about the outmost defenses only of freedom. It is our children's 
children who may perchance be really free. We tax ourselves 
unjustly. There is a part of us which is not represented. It is 
taxation without representation. We quarter troops, we quar- 
ter fools and cattle of all sorts upon ourselves. We quarter 
our gross bodies on our poor souls, till the former eat up all 
the latter's substance. 

With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essen- 
tially provincial still, not metropolitan, — mere Jonathans. 
We are provincial, because we do not find at home our stand- 
ards; because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of 
truth; because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive 
devotion to trade and commerce and manufactures and agri- 
culture and the like, which are but means, and not the end. 



484 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

So is the English Parliament provincial. Mere country- 
bumpkins, they betray themselves, when any more important 
question arises for them to settle, the Irish question, for in- 
stance, — the English question why did I not say? Their 
natures are subdued to what they work in. Their "good 
breeding " respects only secondary objects. The finest manners 
in the world are awkwardness and fatuity when contrasted with 
a finer intelligence. They appear but as the fashions of past 
days, — mere courtliness, knee-buckles and small-clothes, out 
of date. It is the vice, but not the excellence of manners, that 
they are continually being deserted by the character; they are 
cast-off clothes or shells, claiming the respect which belonged 
to the living creature. You are presented with the shells in- 
stead of the meat, and it is no excuse generally, that, in the 
case of some fishes, the shells are of more worth than the meat. 
The man who thrusts his manners upon me does as if he were 
to insist on introducing me to his cabinet of curiosities, when 
I wished to see himself. It was not in this sense that the poet 
Decker called Christ "the first true gentleman that ever 
breathed." I repeat that in this sense the most splendid court 
in Christendom is provincial, having authority to consult 
about Transalpine interests only, and not the affairs of Rome. 
A praetor or proconsul would suffice to settle the questions 
which absorb the attention of the English Parliament and the 
American Congress. 

Government and legislation! these I thought were respect- 
able professions. We have heard of heaven-born Numas, 
Lycurguses, and Solons, in the history of the world, whose 
names at least may stand for ideal legislators; but think of leg- 
islating to regulate the breeding of slaves, or the exportation of 
tobacco ! What have divine legislators to do with the exporta- 
tion or the importation of tobacco? what humane ones with 
the breeding of slaves? Suppose you were to submit the ques- 
tion to any son of God, — and has He no children in the nine- 
teenth century? is it a family which is extinct? — in what con- 
dition would you get it again? What shall a State like Virginia 
say for itself at the last day, in which these have been the 
principal, the staple productions? What ground is there for 
patriotism in such a State? I derive my facts from statistical 
tables which the States themselves have published. 



LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE 485 

A commerce that whitens every sea in quest of nuts and rais- 
ins, and makes slaves of its sailors for this purpose! I saw, the 
other day, a vessel which had been wrecked, and many lives 
lost, and her cargo of rags, juniper-berries, and bitter almonds 
were strewn along the shore. It seemed hardly worth the while 
to tempt the dangers of the sea between Leghorn and New York 
for the sake of a cargo of juniper-berries and bitter almonds. 
America sending to the Old World for her bitters! Is not the 
seabrine, is not shipwreck, bitter enough to make the cup of 
life go down here? Yet such, to a great extent, is our boasted 
commerce; and there are those who style themselves statesmen 
and philosophers who are so blind as to think that progress 
and civilization depend on precisely this kind of interchange 
and activity, — the activity of flies about a molasses-hogshead. 
Very well, observes one, if men were oysters. And very well, 
answer I, if men were mosquitoes. 

Lieutenant Herndon, whom our Government sent to explore 
the Amazon, and, it is said, to extend the area of slavery, ob- 
served that there was wanting there " an industrious and active 
population, who know what the comforts of life are, and who 
have artificial wants to draw out the great resources of the 
country." But what are the " artificial wants" to be encour- 
aged? Not the love of luxuries, like the tobacco and slaves of, 
I believe, his native Virginia, nor the ice and granite and other 
material wealth of our native New England; nor are "the great 
resources of a country" that fertility or barrenness of soil 
which produces these. The chief want, in every State that I 
have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabit- 
ants. This alone draws out "the great resources" of Nature, 
and at last taxes her beyond her resources; for man naturally 
dies out of her. When we want culture more than potatoes, and 
illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources 
of a world are taxed and drawn out, and the result, or staple 
production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men, — those 
rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and 
redeemers. 

In short, as a snow-drift is formed where there is a lull in 
the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an 
institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, 
nevertheless, and at length blows it down. 



486 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

What is called politics is comparatively something so super- 
ficial and inhuman, that practically I have never fairly recog- 
nized that it concerns me at all. The newspapers, I perceive, 
devote some of their columns specially to politics or govern- 
ment without charge; and this, one would say, is all that saves 
it; but as I love literature and to some extent the truth also, 
I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish to blunt 
my sense of right so much. I have not got to answer for having 
read a single President's Message. A strange age of the world 
this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging 
to a private man's door, and utter their complaints at his 
elbow! I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that some 
wretched government or other, hard pushed, and on its last 
legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it, — more 
importunate than an Italian beggar; and if I have a mind to 
look at its certificate, made, perchance, by some benevolent 
merchant's clerk, or the skipper that brought it over, for it can- 
not speak a word of English itself, I shall probably read of the 
eruption of some Vesuvius, or the overflowing of some Po, true 
or forged, which brought it into this condition. I do not hesi- 
tate, in such a case, to suggest work, or the almshouse; or why 
not keep its castle in silence, as I do commonly? The poor 
President, what with preserving his popularity and doing his 
duty, is completely bewildered. The newspapers are the ruling 
power. Any other government is reduced to a few marines at 
Fort Independence. If a man neglects to read the Daily Times, 
government will go down on its knees to him, for this is the 
only treason in these days. 

Those things which now most engage the attention of men, 
as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions 
of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like 
the corresponding functions of the physical body. They are 
infra-human, a kind of vegetation. I sometimes awake to a 
half-consciousness of them going on about me, as a man may 
become conscious of some of the processes of digestion in a 
morbid state, and so have the dyspepsia, as it is called. It is 
as if a thinker submitted himself to be rasped by the great 
gizzard of creation. Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, 
full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two 
opposite halves, — sometimes split into quarters, it may be, 



EXTRACTS FROM THE JOURNAL 487 

which grind on each other. Not only individuals, but states, 
have thus a confirmed dyspepsia, which expresses itself, you 
can imagine by what sort of eloquence. Thus our life is not 
altogether a forgetting, 1 but also, alas! to a great extent, a 
remembering, of that which we should never have been con- 
scious of, certainly not in our waking hours. Why should we 
not meet, not always as dyspeptics, to tell our bad dreams, but. 
sometimes as ewpeptics, to congratulate each other on the ever- 
glorious morning? I do not make an exorbitant demand, surely. 

EXTRACTS FROM THE JOURNAL 2 

As for these communities, I think I had rather keep bache- 
lor's hall in hell than go to board in heaven. Do you think your 
virtue will be boarded with you? It will never live on the inter- 
est of your money, depend upon it. The boarded has no home. 
In heaven I hope to bake my own bread and clean my own 
linen. The tomb is the only boarding-house in which a hundred 
are served at once. In the catacomb we may dwell together 
and prop one another without loss. (1, 227.) 

It is a certain faeryland where we live. You may walk out 
in any direction over the earth's surface, lifting your horizon, 
and everywhere your path, climbing the convexity of the globe, 
leads you between heaven and earth, not away from the light 
of the sun and stars and the habitations of men. I wonder that 
I ever get rive miles on my way, the walk is so crowded with 
events and phenomena, (n, 228-29.) 

On the hillside above Clamshell Ditch, grows that handsome 
grass of Sept. 1st (vide September 4th), evidently Sorghum 

1 "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting." (Wordsworth, "Ode on Intima- 
tions of Immortality.") 

2 The Journal was first published without abridgment (save the slightest) in 
the Walden Edition of Thoreau's writings, 1906. Several of the selections here 
printed are passages that Thoreau inserted in A Week on the Concord and Merri- 
mack Rivers, Walden, and Excursions. "From all points of the compass, from the 
earth beneath and the heavens above, have come these inspirations and been 
entered duly in the order of their arrival in the journal. Thereafter, when the 
time arrived, they were winnowed into lectures, and again, in due time, from 
lectures into essays." (1,413.) "My Journal should be the record of my love. I 
would write in it only of the things I love, my affection for any aspect of the 
world, what I love to think of." (11, 101.) 



4 88 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

nutans (Andropogon of Bigelow), chestnut beard grass, Indian 
grass, wood grass. It is much larger than what I saw before; 
it is abundantly in flower; four and a half feet high; leaves, 
perhaps arundinaceous, eighteen inches long; panicle, nine 
inches long. It is a very handsome, wild-looking grass, well 
enough called Indian grass, and I should have named it with 
the other andropogons, August 26th. With its narrow one- 
sided panicle of bright purple and yellow (I include the yellow 
anthers) often waving [?], raised high above the leaves, it looks 
like a narrow banner. It is of more vivid colors than its con- 
geners, and might well have caught an Indian's eye. These 
bright banners are now advanced on the distant hillsides, not 
in large armies, but scattered troops or single file, like the red 
men themselves. They stand thus fair and bright in our midst, 
as it were representatives of the race which they are named 
after, but for the most part unobserved. It stands like an 
Indian chief taking a last look at his beloved hunting-grounds. 
The expression of this grass haunted me for a week after I first 
passed and noticed it, like the glance of an eye. (xi, 147.) 

I must live above all in the present. (11, 138.) 

Ah, dear nature, the mere remembrance, after a short forget- 
f ulness, of the pine woods ! I come to it as a hungry man to a 
crust of bread, (hi, 133.) 

A momentous silence reigns always in the woods, and their 
meaning seems just ripening into expression. But alas! they 
make no haste. The rush sparrow, Nature's minstrel of serene 
hours, sings of an immense leisure and duration. 

When I hear a robin sing at sunset, I cannot help contrasting 
the equanimity of Nature with the bustle and impatience of 
man. We return from the lyceum and caucus with such stir 
and excitement, as if a crisis were at hand ; but no natural scene 
or sound sympathizes with us, for Nature is always silent and 
unpretending as at the break of day. She but rubs her eyelids. 
(1, 252.) 

These regular phenomena of the seasons get at last to be — 
they were at first, of course — simply and plainly phenomena 



EXTRACTS FROM THE JOURNAL 489 

or phases of my life. The seasons and all their changes are in 
me. I see not a dead eel or floating snake, or a gull, but it 
rounds my life and is like a line or accent in its poem. Almost 
I believe the Concord would not rise and overflow its banks 
again, were I not here. After a while I learn what my moods 
and seasons are. I would have nothing subtracted. I can 
imagine nothing added. My moods are thus periodical, not 
two days in my year alike. The perfect correspondence of 
Nature to man, so that he is at home in her! (x, 127.) 

We soon get through with Nature. She excites an expecta- 
tion which she cannot satisfy. The merest child which has 
rambled into a copsewood dreams of a wilderness so wild and 
strange and inexhaustible as Nature can never show him. The 
red-bird which I saw on my companion's string on election 
days I thought but the outmost sentinel of the wild, immortal 
camp, — of the wild and dazzling infantry of the wilderness, — 
that the deeper woods abounded with redder birds still; but, 
now that I have threaded all our wo6ds and waded the swamps, 
I have never yet met with his compeer, still less his wilder 
kindred. The red-bird which is the last of Nature is but the 
first of God. The White Mountains, likewise, were smooth 
mole-hills to my expectation. We condescend to climb the crags 
of earth. It is our weary legs alone that praise them. That 
forest on whose skirts the red-bird flits is not of earth. I ex- 
pected a fauna more infinite and various, birds of more dazzling 
colors and more celestial song. How many springs shall I con- 
tinue to see the common sucker {Catostomus Bostoniensis) float- 
ing dead on our river! Will not Nature select her types from 
a new fount? The vignette of the year. This earth which is 
spread out like a map around me is but the lining of my inmost 
soul exposed. In me is the sucker that I see. No wholly extra- 
neous object can compel me to recognize it. I am guilty of suck- 
ers. I go about to look at flowers and listen to the birds. There 
was a time when the beauty and the music were all within, 
and I sat and listened to my thoughts, and there was a song in 
them. I sat for hours on rocks and wrestled with the melody 
which possessed me. I sat and listened by the hour to a posi- 
tive though faint and distant music, not sung by any bird, nor 
vibrating any earthly harp. When you walked with a joy 



49© HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

which knew not its own origin. When you were an organ of 
which the world was but one poor broken pipe. I lay long on 
the rocks, foundered like a harp on the seashore, that knows 
not how it is dealt with. You sat on the earth as on a raft, lis- 
tening to music that was not of the earth, but which ruled and 
arranged it. Man should be the harp articulate. When your 
cords were tense, (vi, 293-94.) 

You must walk so gently as to hear the finest sounds, the 
faculties being in repose. Your mind must not perspire. True, 
out of doors my thought is commonly drowned, as it were, and 
shrunken, pressed down by stupendous piles of light ethereal 
influence, for the pressure of the atmosphere is still fifteen 
pounds to a square inch. I can do little more than preserve the 
equilibrium and resist the pressure of the atmosphere. I can 
only nod like the rye-heads in the breeze. I expand more surely 
in my chamber, as far as expression goes, as if that pressure 
were taken off; but here out-doors is the place to store up 
influences. (11, 338.) 

Nothing is so attractive and unceasingly curious as character. 
There is no plant that needs such tender treatment, there is 
none that will endure so rough. It is the violet and the oak. 
It is the thing we mean, let us say what. we will. We mean our 
own character, or we mean yours. It is divine and related to 
the heavens, as the earth is by the flashes of the Aurora. It 
has no acquaintance nor companion. It goes silent and unob- 
served longer than any planet in space, but when at length it 
does show itself, it seems like the flowering of all the world, 
and its before unseen orbit is lit up like the trail of a meteor. 
I hear no good news ever but some trait of a noble character. 
It reproaches me plaintively. I am mean in contrast, but again 
am thrilled and elevated that I can see my own meanness, and 
again still, that my own aspiration is realized in that other. 
You reach me, my friend, not by your kind or wise words to 
me here or there; but as you retreat, perhaps after years of vain 
familiarity, some gesture or unconscious action in the distance 
speaks to me with more emphasis than all those years. I am 
not concerned to know what eighth planet is wandering in space 
up there, or when Venus or Orion rises, but if, in any cot to 



EXTRACTS FROM THE JOURNAL 491 

east or west and set behind the woods, there is any planetary- 
character illuminating the earth. (1, 290-91.) 

There was a remarkable sunset, I think the 25th of October. 
The sunset sky reached quite from west to east, and it was the 
most varied in its forms and colors of any that I remember to 
have seen. At one time the clouds were most softly and deli- 
cately rippled, like the ripple-marks on sand. But it was hard 
for me to see its beauty then, when my mind was filled with 
Captain Brown. So great a wrong as his fate implied overshad- 
owed all beauty in the world. 1 (xn, 443.) 

By spells seriousness will be forced to cut capers, and drink 
a deep and refreshing draught of silliness; to turn this sedate 
day of Lucifer's and Apollo's, into an all fools' day for Harle- 
quin and Cornwallis. The sun does not grudge his rays to 
either, but they are alike patronized by the gods. Like over- 
tasked schoolboys, all my members and nerves and sinews 
petition Thought for a recess, and my very thigh-bones itch to 
slip away from under me, and run and join the melee. I exult 
in stark inanity, leering on nature and the soul. We think the 
gods reveal themselves only to sedate and musing gentlemen. 
But not so ; the buffoon in the midst of his antics catches unob- 
served glimpses, which he treasures for the lonely hour. When 
I have been playing tom-fool, I have been driven to exchange 
the old for a more liberal and catholic philosophy. (1, 175-76.) 

When I consider how, after sunset, the stars come out gradu- 
ally in troops from behind the hills and woods, I confess that I 
could not have contrived a more curious and inspiring night. 
(1, 170.) 

When the wind blows, the fine snow comes filtering down 
through all the aisles of the wood in a golden cloud. (1, 184.) 

After the evening train has gone by and left the world to 

silence and to me, the whip-poor-will chants her vespers for 

half an hour. And when all is still at night, the owls take up 

the strain, like mourning women their ancient ululu. Their most 

x Cf. "A Plea for Captain John Brown," in Miscellanies. 



492 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

dismal scream is truly Ben-Jonsonian. Wise midnight hags! 
It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but, 
without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, — but the 
mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs 
and the delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. And 
yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled 
along the woodside, reminding me sometimes of music and 
singing birds, as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, 
the regrets and sighs, that would fain be sung. The spirits, the 
low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen spirits who 
once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds 
of darkness, now expiating with their wailing hymns, threnodiai, 
their sins in the very scenery of their transgressions. They give 
me a new sense of the vastness and mystery of that nature 
which is the common dwelling of us both. "Oh-o-o-o-o that I 
never had been bor-or-or-or-rn ! " sighs one on this side of the 
pond, and circles in the restlessness of despair to some new 
perch in the gray oaks. Then, "That I never had been bor-or- 
or-or-orn!" echoes one on the further side, with a tremulous 
sincerity, and "Bor-or-or-or-orn" comes faintly from far in the 
Lincoln woods. 

And then the frogs, bullfrogs; they are the more sturdy 
spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, 
trying to sing a catch in their Stygian lakes. They would fain 
keep up the hilarious good fellowship and all the rules of their 
old round tables, but they have waxed hoarse and solemnly 
grave and serious their voices, mocking at mirth, and their 
wine has lost its flavor and is only liquor to distend their 
paunches, and never comes sweet intoxication to drown the 
memory of the past, but mere saturation and water-logged 
dullness and distension. Still the most aldermanic, with his 
chin upon a pad, which answers for a napkin to his drooling 
chops, under the eastern shore quaffs a deep draught of the 
once scorned water, and passes round the cup with the ejacu- 
lation tr-r-r-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-r-oonk! and straight- 
way comes over the water from some distant cove the selfsame 
password, where the next in seniority and girth has gulped 
down to his mark; and when the strain has made the circuit 
of the shores, then ejaculates the master of ceremonies with 



EXTRACTS FROM THE JOURNAL 493 

satisfaction tr-r-r-r-oonk! and each in turn repeats the sound, 
down to the least distended, leakiest, flabbiest paunched, that 
there be no mistake ; and the bowl goes round again, until the 
sun dispels the morning mist, and only the patriarch is not 
under the pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, 
pausing for a reply. (1, 378-80.) 

July 12. 8 p.m. — Now at least the moon is full, and I walk 
alone, which is best by night, if not by day always. Your com- 
panion must sympathize with the present mood. The conver- 
sation must be located where the walkers are, and vary exactly 
with the scene and events and the contour of the ground. Fare- 
well to those who will talk of nature unnaturally, whose pres- 
ence is an interruption. I know but one with whom I can walk. 
I might as well be sitting in a bar-room with them as walk and 
talk with most. We are never side by side in our thoughts, and 
we cannot hear each other's silence. Indeed, we cannot be 
silent. We are forever breaking silence, that is all, and mending 
nothing. How can they keep together who are going different 
ways! 

I start a sparrow from her three eggs in the grass, where she 
had settled for the night. The earliest corn is beginning to 
show its tassels now, and I scent it as I walk, — its peculiar 
dry scent. (This afternoon I gathered ripe blackberries, and 
felt as if the autumn had commenced.) Now perchance many 
sounds and sights only remind me that they once said some- 
thing to me, and are so by association interesting. I go forth 
to be reminded of a previous state of existence, if perchance 
any memento of it is to be met with hereabouts. I have no 
doubt that Nature preserves her integrity. Nature is in as 
rude health as when Homer sang. We may at last by our sym- 
pathies be well. I see a skunk on Bear Garden Hill stealing 
noiselessly away from me, while the moon shines over the pitch 
pines, which send long shadows down the hill. Now, looking 
back, I see it shining on the south side of farmhouses and barns 
with a weird light, for I pass here half an hour later than last 
night. I smell the huckleberry bushes. I hear a human voice, 
— some laborer singing after his day's toil, — which I do not 
often hear. Loud it must be, for it is far away. Methinks I 
should know it for a white man's voice. Some strains have the 



494 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

melody of an instrument. Now I hear the sound of a bugle in 
the "Corner," reminding me of poetic wars; a few flourishes 
and the bugler has gone to rest. At the foot of the Cliff hill I 
hear the sound of the clock striking nine, as distinctly as within 
a quarter of a mile usually, though there is no wind. The moon- 
light is more perfect than last night; hardly a cloud in the sky, 
— only a few fleecy ones. There is more serenity and more 
light. I hear that sort of throttled or chuckling note as of a 
bird flying high, now from this side, then from that. Methinks 
when I turn my head I see Wachusett from the side of the hill. 
I smell the butter-and-eggs as I walk. I am startled by the 
rapid transit of some wild animal across my path, a rabbit or a 
fox, — or you hardly know if it be not a bird. Looking down 
from the cliffs, the leaves of the tree-tops shine more than ever 
by day. Here and there a lightning-bug shows his greenish light 
over the tops of the trees. 

As I return through the orchard, a foolish robin bursts away 
from his perch unnaturally, with the habits of man. The air is 
remarkably still and unobjectionable on the hilltop, and the 
whole world below is covered as with a gossamer blanket of 
moonlight. It is just about as yellow as a blanket. It is a great 
dimly burnished shield with darker blotches on its surface. You 
have lost some light, it is true, but you have got this simple 
and magnificent stillness, brooding like genius, (n, 302-04.) 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

LETTERS x 

To Master Robert T. S. Lowell 

Nov. 2, 1828. 2 
My dear Brother, — I am now going to tell you melan- 
choly news. I have got the ague together with a gumbile. I 
presume you know that September has got a lame leg, but he 
grows better every day and now is very well but still limps a 
little. We have a new scholar from round hill, his name is 
Hooper and we expect another named Penn who I believe also 
comes from there. The boys are all very well except Nemaise, 
who has got another piece of glass in his leg and is waiting for 
the doctor to take it out, and Samuel Storrow is also sick. I am 
going to have a new suit of blue broadcloth clothes to wear 
every day and to play in. Mother tells me that I may have any 
sort of buttons I choose. I have not done anything to the hut 
but if you wish I will. I am now very happy; but I should be 
more so if you were here. I hope you will answer my letter if 
you do not I shall write you no more letters, when you write 
my letters you must direct them all to me and not write half 
to mother as generally do. Mother has given me the three 
volumes of tales of a grandfather. 

farewell 

Yours truly 

James R. Lowell. 

You must excuse me for making so many mistakes. You 
must keep what I have told you about my new clothes a secret 
if you dont I shall not divulge any more secrets to you. I have 
got quite a library. The Master has not taken his rattan out 
since the vacation. Your little kitten is as well and as playful 
as ever and I hope you are to for I am sure I love you as well as 

1 From Letters of James Russell Lowell, edited by Charles Eliot Norton; copy- 
right, 1893, by Harper and Brothers. All of the letters here printed are com- 
plete, or, rather, as nearly complete as in the Norton text. 

2 Lowell was born in 1819. 



496 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

ever. Why is grass like a mouse you cant guess that he he he 
ho ho ho ha ha ha hum hum hum. 

To G. B. Loring 

Cambridge, I don't know the date. 
[April 10, 1837.] 

Dear George, — ■ . . . I have written about an hundred 
lines of my poem(?), and I suspect it is going to be a pretty 
good one. At least, some parts of it will take. 'T is a pretty 
good subject, but I find it enlarging as I progress. "Crescit 
euiido," 1 like the balls of snow we used to roll when we were 
boys. By the way, that's not a bad simile. I might alter it into 
an avalanche and bring it into the poem, in which I intend to 
say how much beyond me the subject is. . . . 

I am as busy as a bee — almost. I study and read and write 
all the time. 

I have laid my hands on a very pretty edition of Cowper, 
which I intend to keep. In two volumes. 

I have also "pinned" some letters relating to myself in my 
early childhood, by which it seems I was a miracle of a boy for 
sweetness of temper. "Credite posteri"! 2 I believe I was, 
although perhaps you would not think it now. 

George, you are in a very dangerous situation. Surrounded 

as you are by temptations, with Miss K your next-door 

neighbor, and the eyes of Miss H blazing across but a small 

meadow, you cannot be too careful of yourself. You may trust 
my advice, for, in common with Petrarch, Dante, Tasso, and 
Byron, I was desperately in love before I was ten years old. 
What pangs I have suffered my own heart, perhaps, only 
knows. . . . 

Your most affectionate friend, 

Lowell. 

To C. F. Briggs 

Elmwood, Nov. 25, 1853. 3 

My dear old Friend, — Your letter came while I was sadly 
sealing up and filing away old letters, for I feel now for the first 

1 "It grows by going." 2 "Let posterity believe it." , 

8 Maria White Lowell died on October 27. 



LETTERS 497 

time old, and as if I had a past — something, I mean, quite 
alien to my present life, and from which I am now exiled. How 
beautiful that past was and how I cannot see it clearly yet for 
my tears I need not tell you. I can only hope and pray that 
the sweet influences of thirteen years spent with one like her 
may be seen and felt in my daily life henceforth. At present I 
only feel that there is a chamber whose name is Peace, and 
which opens towards the sunrising, and that I am not in it. I 
keep repeating to myself "by and by," "by and by," till that 
trivial phrase has acquired an intense meaning. I know very 
well that this sunset-glow, even of a life like hers, will fade by 
degrees; that the brisk, busy day will return with its bills and 
notes and beef and beer, intrusive, distracting — but in the 
meantime I pray. I do abhor sentimentality from the bottom 
of my soul, and cannot wear my grief upon my sleeves, but yet 
I look forward with agony to the time when she may become a 
memory instead of a constant presence. She promised to be 
with me if that were possible, but it demands all the energy of 
the soul to believe without sight, and all the unmetaphysical 
simplicity of faith to distinguish between fact and fancy. I 
know that the little transparent film which covers the pupil of 
my eye is the only wall between her world and mine, but that 
hair-breadth is as effectual as the space between us and the sun. 
I cannot see her, I cannot feel when I come home that she 
comes to the door to welcome me as she always did. I can only 
hope that when I go through the last door that opens for all of 
us I may hear her coming step upon the other side. That her 
death was so beautiful and calm and full of faith as it was gives 
me no consolation, for it was only that rare texture of her life 
continuing to the very end, and makes me feel all the more 
what I had and what I have not. 

I began this upon a great sheet because it reminded me of 
the dear old times that are dead and buried now. But I cannot 
write much more. I keep myself employed most of the time — 
in something mechanical as much as possible — and in walking. 

You say something of coming to Boston. I wish I could see 
you. It would be a great comfort. . . . 

I am glad for your friendly sake that my article was a pop- 
ular one, but the news of it only pained me. It came too late 
to please the only human being to please whom I greatly cared 



498 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

and whose satisfaction was to me prosperity and fame. But 
her poem — how beautiful it was, and how fitting for the 
last! . . . 

So God bless you, and think of me always as your more 
loving friend, 

J. R. L. 

To Miss Loring 

No. 4, Kleine Schiessgasse, 
Dresden, Oct. 3, 1855. 

... I am beim Herrn Hofrath Dr. Reichenbach, who is one 
of the kindest of men, and Madame is a "first-rate fullah" 
too, as my nephew Willie would say. I have a large room am 
Parterre, with a glass door opening upon a pretty garden. My 
walls are hung with very nice pictures painted by the gnadige 
Frau herself; and they were so thoughtful as to send down 
before I came a large case with American birds very well stuffed 
and mounted, so that I might have some friends. Some of them 
are very familiar, and I look at the oriole sometimes till I hear 
him whistling over the buttercups in the dear old times at 
Elmwood. Ah, how deep out of the past his song comes! But 
hin ist kin, verloren ist verloren! 1 Then I have one of those sol- 
emn ceremonials, a German bed — with a feather-bed under 
which I engrave myself at night and dream that I am awaiting 
the last trump. Then I have the prettiest writing-table, bought 
expres pour moi 2 by Madame, well ich ein Dichter bin 3 — and 
at which I am now sitting — with drawers for everything and 
nothing. I rack my brains for what to put in 'em. I am fast 
turning into a "regular" German, according to the definition 
of that Italian innkeeper at Amalfi, who told me, speaking of 
a man that was drowned, " bisognerebbe che fosse un Tedesco 
per che sempre stava a casa, e non faceva niente che fumare e 
studiare." 4 I get up um sieben Uhr, 5 and das Madchen brings 
me my coffee and Butterbrod at 8. Then I begin to study. I am 
reading for my own amusement (du lieber Gott!) the aesihet- 
ische Forschungen von Adolf Zeising, pp. 568, large octavo! 

1 The past is past, the lost is lost. 

2 Expressly for me. 3 Because I am a poet. 

4 "He must have been a German because he always stayed at home and did 
nothing but smoke and study." 
6 At seven o'clock. 



LETTERS 



499 



Then I overset something aus 1 German into English. Then 
comes dinner at i o'clock, with ungeheuer 2 German dishes. 
Nachmittag 3 I study Spanish with a nice young Spaniard who 
is in the house, to whom I teach English in return. Um seeks 
Uhr ich gehe spazieren, 4 and at 7 come home, and Dr. R. dic- 
tates and I write. Aber potztausend Donnerwetter ! 5 what a 
language it is to be sure ! with nominatives sending out as many 
roots as that witch-grass which is the pest of all child-gardens, 
and sentences in which one sets sail like an admiral with sealed 
orders, not knowing where the devil he is going to till he is in 
mid-ocean! Then, after tea, we sit and talk German — or 
what some of us take to be such — and which I speak already 
like a native — of some other country. But Madame R. is very 
kind and takes great pains to set me right. The confounded 
genders ! If I die I will have engraved on my tombstone that I 
died of der, die, das, not because I caught 'em, but because I 
could n't. Dr. R. is one of the most distinguished Naturwissen- 
schaftsgelehrten(!!) 6 in Europe — a charming, friendly, simple- 
hearted man. I attend his Vorlesungen und etwas verstehe. . . . 7 

To C. E. Norton 

Cambridge, Sept. 16, 1856. 

... I have just come in from a walk up the little lane that 
runs down behind the hill to Fresh Pond. It is one of the few 
spots left something like what it was when I was a boy, and I 
can pick hazelnuts from the same bushes which brought me 
and the chipmunks together thirty years ago. I really think 
it is bad for our moral nature here in America that so many of 
the links that bind us to our past are severed in one way or 
another, and am grateful for anything that renews in me that 
capacity for mere delight which made my childhood the richest 
part of my life. It seems to me as if I had never seen nature 
again since those old days when the balancing of a yellow butter- 
fly over a thistlebroom was spiritual food and lodging for a 
whole forenoon. This morning I have had it all over again. 

1 Translate something from 2 Enormous. 

3 In the afternoons. * At six o'clock I go for a walk. 

5 But the deuce! Zounds!! 6 Natural scientists. 

7 I attend his lectures and understand something. 



5 oo JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

There were the same high-heaped shagbark-trees — the same 
rosebushes with their autumn corals on — the same curving 
golden-rods and wide-eyed asters — the same heavy-headed 
goatsbeard — the same frank blue sky — the same cloud- 
shadows I used to race with — the same purple on the western 
hills — and, as I walked along, the great-grandchildren of the 
same metallic deviPs-darning-needles slid sideways from the 
path and were back again as soon as I had passed. Nature has 
not budged an inch in all these years, and meanwhile over how 
many thistles have I hovered and thought I was — no matter 
what; it is splendid, as girls say, to dream backward so. One 
feels as if he were a poet, and one's own Odyssey sings itself in 
one's blood as he walks. I do not know why I write this to you 
so far away, except that as this world goes it is something to be 
able to say, "I have been happy for two hours." I wanted to 
tell you, too, what glorious fall weather we are having, clear 
and champagney, the northwest wind crisping Fresh Pond to 
steel-blue, and curling the wet lily-pads over till they bloom in 
a sudden flash of golden sunshine. How I do love the earth! 
I feel it thrill under my feet. I feel somehow as if it were con- 
scious of my love, as if something passed into my dancing blood 
from it, and I get rid of that dreadful duty-feeling — " what 
right have I to be?" — and not a golden-rod of them all soaks 
in the sunshine or feels the blue currents of the air eddy about 
him more thoughtlessly than I. 

I wish I could reach you a cup of this wine over those briny 
leagues. I drink your health in it, and then the glass shatters 
as usual. . . . 

. . . You ask about me. I have not begun to lecture yet, but 
am to deliver my old Lowell Institute Course first and then 
some on German Literature and Dante. ... 

To C. E. Norton 

Cambridge, 2d day of Holy Week, 
May, 1859. 

.'. . I miss you like thunder — ca va sans dire 1 — especially 
in this George-Herbert's-Sunday kind of weather, which is cool 
and calm and bright as can be thought. I fancy you listening 

1 That goes without saying. 



LETTERS 501 

to the bobolinks among the lush grass on the lawn. I heard 
them yesterday on my way to the printing-office for the first 
time this spring. That liquid tinkle of theirs is the true foun- 
tain of youth if one can only drink it with the right ears, and I 
always date the New Year from the day of my first draught. 
Messer Roberto di Lincoln, with his summer alb over his shoul- 
ders, is the true chorister for the bridals of earth and sky. There 
is no bird that seems to me so thoroughly happy as he, so void 
of all arriere pensee l about getting a livelihood. The robin sings 
matins and vespers somewhat conscientiously, it seems to me 
— makes a business of it and pipes as it were by the yard — 
but Bob squanders song like a poet, has no rain-song (as the 
robin has, who prophesies the coming wet that will tempt the 
worms out — with an eye to grub), and seems to have no other 
tune than, mihi est propositum in tabernd mori, 2 with a long 
unpaid score chalked up against him behind the door. He never 
forebodes or remembers anything, won't sing in wet weather, 
but takes a thoughtless delight in present sunshine. I am sure 
he leaves debts behind him when he comes up from Carolina 
in May. Well, you see I was happy yesterday on my way to 
Riverside. I indulged in my favorite pastime of sitting on a 
fence in the sunshine and basking. The landscape was perfect. 
. . . Sweet Auburn pink with new-leaved oaks, Corey's Hill 
green in the hay-fields and brown with squares of freshly turned 
furrows (versus, the farmer's poem), the orchards rosy with 
apple-blooms, the flowering grasses just darkening the mead- 
ows to set off the gold of the buttercups, here and there pale 
splashes of Houstonia dropt from the Galaxy, and the river all 
blue and gold. This is Cambridge, sir! What is Newport to 
this? But I am bobolinking instead of attending to busi- 
ness. . . . 

To Thomas Hughes 3 

Elmwood, Oct. 18, 1870. 

My dear old Friend, — Parting with you was like saying 
good-by to sunshine. As I took my solitary whiff o' baccy, after 
I got home, my study looked bare, and my old cronies on the 

1 Thought held back; afterthought. 

2 "It is my plan to die in a tavern." (Medieval drinking-song.) 

3 Author of Tom Brown's School-Days and Tom Brown at Oxford. 



5 o2 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

shelves could not make up to me for my new loss. I sat with 
my book on my knee and mused with a queer feeling about my 
eyelids now and then. And yet you have left so much behind 
that is precious to me, that by and by I know that my room 
will have a virtue in it never there before, because of your pres- 
ence. And now it seems so short — a hail at sea with a God- 
speed and no more. But you will come back, I am sure. We 
all send love and regret. 

The day after you left us Rose discovered your thin coat, 
which she called a "duster." 1 had half a mind to confiscate 
it, it was such a good one; but on second thoughts concluded 
that that was, on the whole, as good a reason for sending it 
back as for keeping it. 

Letters continue to pour in, and I enclose them with the coat 
to No. 9 Lexington Avenue. There came also a telegram from 
Montreal, which I felt justified in opening. From what you 
had told me, I had no doubt that you had already answered in 
a letter. It only said that they should expect you on Tuesday. 

As you will no doubt see Bryce and Dicey in London, pray 
tell them how sorry I was not to see more of them. They left 
many friends in Cambridge. If all Englishmen could only 
take America so "naturally" as you did! I think, if it could 
be so, there would never be any risk of war. That reminds me 
that I am sure your address has done great good. It has set 
people thinking, and that is all we need. I enclose a little poem 
from to-day's Advertiser which pleased me. I do not know who 
"H. T. B." is, but I think his verses very sweet, and Mrs. 
Hughes may like to see them. I would rather have the kind of 
welcome that met you in this country than all the shouts of all 
the crowds on the "Via Sacra" of Fame. There was "love" 
in it, you beloved old boy, and no man ever earns that for 
nothing — unless now and then from a woman. By Jove! it is 
worth writing books for — such a feeling as that. . . . 

I am holding "Good-by" at arm's length as long as I can, 
but I must come to it. Give my kindest regards to Rawlins, 
and take all my heart yourself. God bless you. A pleasant voy- 
age, and all well in the nest when you get back to it. 
Always most affectionately yours, 

J. R. Lowell. 



LETTERS 503 

To C. E. Norton 

Elmwood, Sept. s, 1871. 

. . . Yesterday, as I was walking down the Beacon Street 
mall, the yellowing leaves were dozily drifting from the trees, 
and the sentiment of autumn was in all the air ; though the day, 
despite an easterly breeze, was sultry. I enjoyed the laziness of 
everything to the core, and sauntered as idly as a thistledown, 
thinking with a pleasurable twinge of sympathy that the fall 
was beginning for me also, and that the buds of next season 
were pushing our stems from their hold on the ever-renewing 
tree of Life. I am getting to be an old fellow, and my sheaves 
are not so many as I hoped ; but I am outwardly more prosper- 
ous than ever before — indeed, than ever I dreamed of being. 
If none of my stays give way, I shall have a clear income of 
over four thousand a year, with a house over my head, and a 
great heap of what I have always found the best fertilizer of 
the mind — leisure. I cannot tell you how this sense of my 
regained paradise of Independence enlivens me. It is some- 
thing I have not felt for years — hardly since I have been 
a professor. . . . Meanwhile I am getting a kind of fame — 
though I never valued that, as you know — and what is better, 
a certain respect as a man of some solid qualities, which I do 
value highly. I have always believed that a man's fate is born 
with him, and that he cannot escape from it nor greatly modify 
it — and that consequently every one gets in the long run 
exactly what he deserves, neither more nor less. At any rate, 
this is a cheerful creed, and enables one to sleep soundly in the 
very shadow of Miltiades' trophy. What I said long ago is lit- 
erally true, that it is only for the sake of those who believed in 
us early that we desire the verdict of the world in our favor. 
It is the natural point of honor to hold our endorsers harmless. 
... It is always my happiest thought that with all the draw- 
backs of temperament (of which no one is more keenly con- 
scious than myself) I have never lost a friend. For I would 
rather be loved than anything else in the world. I always 
thirst after affection, and depend more on the expression of it 
than is altogether wise. And yet I leave the letters of those I 
love unanswered so long ! It is because the habits of authorship 
are fatal to the careless unconsciousness that is the life of a 



504 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

letter, and still more, in my case, that I have always something 
on my mind — an uneasy sense of disagreeable duties to come, 
which I cannot shake myself free from. But worse than all is 
that lack of interest in one's self that comes of drudgery — for 
I hold that a letter which is not mainly about the writer of it 
lacks the prime flavor. The wine must smack a little of the cask. 
You will recognize the taste of my old wood in this! . . . 

To Miss Norton 

i 

Hotel de Lorraine, 7 Rue de Beaune, 
Paris, March 4, 1873. 

. . . We have enjoyed our winter here on the whole very 
much, and have really learned something of the French and 
their ways — more than ten years on the other side of the river 
would have done for us. The French are fearfully and wonder- 
fully made in some respects, but I like them and their pretty 
ways. It is a positive pleasure (after home experiences, where 
one has to pad himself all over against the rude elbowing of 
life) to go and buy a cigar. It is an affair of the highest and 
most gracious diplomacy, and we spend more monsieurs and 
madames upon it than would supply all the traffic of Cambridge 
for a half-century. It is a good drill, for I have always been of 
the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective 
weapons against the bowie-knife, the only thing that will save 
us from barbarism. Our little hotel is very pleasant in its way, 
and its clientele is of the most respectable. ... I can't remem- 
ber whether I told Charles that one of our convives turned out 
to be a gentleman who had lived many years in Finland, and 
had translated into French my favorite "Kalewala." He tells 
me that the Finns recite their poems six or seven hours on the 
stretch, spelling one another, as we say in New England. This 
would make easily possible the recitation of a poem like the 
"Roland," for example, or of one even much longer. . . . 

To C. E. Norton 

Whitby, 1 Aug. 18, 1889. 

. . . You are a little severe in your judgment of English 
society. Buffalo Bill has been taken up by a certain layer of 
1 The watering-place in the north of England. 



LETTERS 505 

society, but not, I should say, by society in its better sense. 

The has debased a considerable circle, the circumference 

of which is spreading, as in stagnant pools a circle once started 
will. There is a partial truth in what you say about society 
here losing its fastidiousness, but this is mainly true of the 

's set, and those who are infected by it or wish to be of it. 

I have not met B. B., but Colonel Colville told me (you know 
him, I think?) that "B. B. was one of the finest men he ever 
saw and of princely manners." Moreover, he is really a Some- 
body and the best of his kind. But I think the true key to this 
eagerness for lions — even of the poodle sort — is the dulness 
of the average English mind. I never come back here without 
being struck with it. Henry James said it always stupefied 
him at first when he came back from the Continent. What 
it craves beyond everything is a sensation, anything that will 
serve as a Worcestershire sauce to its sluggish palate. We 
of finer and more touchy fibre get our sensations cheaper, and 
do not find Wordsworth's emotion over a common flower so 
very wonderful. People are dull enough on our side of the 
ocean-stream also, God wot; but here, unless I know my 
people, I never dare to let my mind gambol. Most of them, if I 
ever do, look on like the famous deaf man atthe dancers, won- 
dering to what music I am capering. They call us superficial. 
Let us thank God, dear Charles, that our nerves are nearer the 
surface, not so deeply embedded in fat or muscle that wit must 
take a pitchfork to us. 

I am fairly contented here, almost happy sometimes, nay, 
should be often, could I jump off my own shadow. I know no 
expedient to get rid of it but Peter Schlemihl's, 1 and alas, no- 
body, not even the D — 1, thinks mine worth buying. 'T is a 
beautiful place, with associations that touch me deeply when 
I am conscious of them, and qualify my mood insensibly when 
I am not. I have done some reading in Lope de Vega, but am 
not drawn to him or by him as to and by Calderon. Yet he is 
wonderful, too, in his way. . . . 

1 Peter Schlemihl, in the story by A. von Chamisso, sold his shadow to an 
agent of the devil. 



506 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

To Mrs. Edward Burnett 

Elmwood, Cambridge, June 14, 1891. 1 

. . . Thermometer 76 , north veranda a paradise, the pale 
green of the catalpa so beautiful against the darker of the 
English elms that I can hardly keep my eyes on my paper to 
write; Joe sitting near me doing his algebra, which he is using, 
I fear, as a prophylactic against the piety of church-going, and 
I weakly submitting, in the absence of the domestic despot — 
such is the mise-en-scene. My handwriting will run down hill. 
I suppose because / am — in spite of continued watchfulness 
on my part. 

The house goes on quietly enough so far as I can see. . . . 
Shall I send you The Moonstone? I found it very interesting — 
not such a breakneck interest as Reade's, where one follows the 
scent of the plot headlong as that of a fox in the hunting-field, 
but still with an interest keen enough for the arm-chair. I am 
now in the midst of Armadale. 

I have said all that I know, except that George continues to 
worry the lawn with his two machines, one of which perfects 
the roughness left by the other. His air when mounted on the 
horse-machine puts me in mind of Neptune in the Iliad. . . . 

EMERSON THE LECTURER 2 

It is a singular fact that Mr. Emerson is the most steadily 
attractive lecturer in America. Into that somewhat cold- 
waterish region adventurers of the sensational kind come down 
now and then with a splash, to become disregarded King Logs 
before the next season. 3 But Mr. Emerson always draws. A 
lecturer now for something like a third of a century, one of the 
pioneers of the lecturing system, the charm of his voice, his 
manner, and his matter has never lost its power over his earlier 
hearers, and continually winds new ones in its enchanting 

1 The last letter but one: Lowell died on August 12. 

2 First published in the Atlantic Monthly, February, 1861, as a review of 
Conduct of Life ; revised in 1868. 

3 According to .^Esop, the frogs having petitioned Jupiter for a king, Jupiter 
cast a log among them, which ruled satisfactorily till the frogs lost their fright 
and knew the log for what it was. "King Log" was then "disregarded." 



EMERSON THE LECTURER 507 

meshes. What they do not fully understand they take on trust, 
and listen, saying to themselves, as the old poet of Sir Philip 
Sidney, — 

"A sweet, attractive, kind of grace, 
A full assurance given by looks, 
Continual comfort in a face, 

The lineaments of gospel books." 

We call it a singular fact, because we Yankees are thought 
to be fond of the spread-eagle style, and nothing can be more 
remote from that than his. We are reckoned a practical folk, 
who would rather hear about a new air-tight stove than about 
Plato ; yet our favorite teacher's practicality is not in the least 
of the Poor Richard variety. If he have any Buncombe con- 
stituency, it is that unrealized commonwealth of philosophers 
which Plotinus proposed to establish; and if he were to make 
an almanac, his directions to farmers would be something like 
this: "October: Indian Summer; now is the time to get in 
your early Vedas." What, then, is his secret? Is it not that he 
out-Yankees us all? that his range includes us all? that he is 
equally at home with the potato-disease and original sin, with 
pegging shoes and the Over-Soul? that, as we try all trades, so 
has he tried all cultures? and above all, that his mysticism 
gives us a counterpoise to our super-practicality? 

There is no man living to whom, as a writer, so many of us 
feel and thankfully acknowledge so great an indebtedness for 
ennobling impulses, — none whom so many cannot abide. 
What does he mean? ask these last. Where is his system? What 
is the use of it all? What the deuce have we to do with Brahma? 
I do not propose to write an essay on Emerson at this time. 
I will only say that one may find grandeur and consolation in a 
starlit night without caring to ask what it means, save grandeur 
and consolation; one may like Montaigne, as some ten genera- 
tions before us have done, without thinking him so systematic 
as some more eminently tedious (or shall we say tediously emi- 
nent?) authors; one may think roses as good in their way as 
cabbages, though the latter would make a better show in the 
witness-box, if cross-examined as to their usefulness; and as 
for Brahma, why, he can take care of himself, and won't bite 
us at any rate. 

The bpther with Mr. Emerson is, that, though he writes in 



5 o8 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

prose, he is essentially a poet. If you undertake to paraphrase 
what he says, and to reduce it to words of one syllable for infant 
minds, you will make as sad work of it as the good monk with 
his analysis of Homer in the Epistolos Obscurorum Virorum. 1 
■ We look upon him as one of the few men of genius whom our 
age has produced, and there needs no better proof of it than his 
masculine faculty of fecundating other minds. Search for his 
eloquence in his books and you will perchance miss it, but mean- 
while you will find that it has kindled all your thoughts. For 
choice and pith of language he belongs to a better age than 
ours, and might rub shoulders with Fuller and Browne, — 
though he does use that abominable word reliable. His eye for 
a fine, telling phrase that will carry true is like that of a back- 
woodsman for a rifle; and he will dredge you up a choice word 
from the mud of Cotton Mather himself. A diction at once so 
rich and so homely as his I know not where to match in these 
days of writing by the page; it is like homespun cloth-of-gold. 
The many cannot miss his meaning, and only the few can find 
it. It is the open secret of all true genius. It is wholesome to 
angle in those profound pools, though one be rewarded with 
nothing more than the leap of a fish that flashes his freckled 
side in the sun and as suddenly absconds in the dark and 
dreamy waters again. There is keen excitement, though there 
be no ponderable acquisition. If we carry nothing home in our 
baskets, there is ample gain in dilated lungs and stimulated 
blood. What does he mean, quotha? He means inspiring hints, 
a divining-rod to your deeper nature. No doubt, Emerson, 
like all original men, has his peculiar audience, and yet I know 
none that can hold a promiscuous crowd in pleased attention 
so long as he. As in all original men, there is something for 
every palate. "Would you know," says Goethe, "the ripest 
cherries? Ask the boys and the blackbirds." 

The announcement that such a pleasure as a new course of 
lectures by him is coming, to people as old as I am, is some- 
thing like those forebodings of spring that prepare us every 
year for a familiar novelty, none the less novel, when it arrives, 
because it is familiar. We know perfectly well what we are to 
expect from Mr. Emerson, and yet what he says always pene- 
trates and stirs us, as is apt to be the case with genius, in a very 
1 Letters of Obscure Men, a Renaissance work of uncertain authorship. 



EMERSON THE LECTURER 509 

unlooked-for fashion. Perhaps genius is one of the few things 
which we gladly allow to repeat itself, — one of the few that 
multiply rather than weaken the force of their impression by 
iteration? Perhaps some of us hear more than the mere words, 
are moved by something deeper than the thoughts? If it be so, 
we are quite right, for it is thirty years and more of "plain 
living and high thinking" that speak to us in this altogether 
unique lay-preacher. We have shared in the beneficence of this 
varied culture, this fearless impartiality in criticism and specu- 
lation, this masculine sincerity, this sweetness of nature which 
rather stimulates than cloys, for a generation long. If ever 
there was a standing testimonial to the cumulative power and 
value of Character (and we need it sadly in these days), we 
have it in this gracious and dignified presence. What an anti- 
septic is a pure life! At sixty-five (or two years beyond his 
grand climacteric, as he would prefer to call it) he has that 
privilege of soul which abolishes the calendar, and presents 
him to us always the unwasted contemporary of his own prime. 
I do not know if he seem old to his younger hearers, but we who 
have known him so long wonder at the tenacity with which he 
maintains himself even in the outposts of youth. I suppose it 
is not the Emerson of 1868 to whom we listen. For us the whole 
life of the man is distilled in the clear drop of every sentence, 
and behind each word we divine the force of a noble character, 
the weight of a large capital of thinking and being. We do not 
go to hear what Emerson says so much as to hear Emerson. - 
Not that we perceive any falling-off in anything that ever was 
essential to the charm of Mr. Emerson's peculiar style of 
thought or phrase. The first lecture, to be sure, was more dis- 
jointed even than common. It was as if, after vainly trying to 
get his paragraphs into sequence and order, he had at last tried 
the desperate expedient of shuffling them. It was chaos come 
again, but it was a chaos full of shooting-stars, a jumble of cre- 
ative forces. The second lecture, on "Criticism and Poetry," 
was quite up to the level of old times, full of that power of 
strangely subtle association whose indirect approaches startle 
the mind into almost painful attention, of those flashes of mu- 
tual understanding between speaker and hearer that are gone 
ere one can say it lightens. The vice of Emerson's criticism 
seems to be, that while no man is so sensitive to what is poeti- 



510 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

cal, few men are less sensible than he of what makes a poem. 
-He values the solid meaning of thought above the subtler 
meaning of style. He would prefer Donne, I suspect, to Spen- 
ser, and sometimes mistakes the queer for the original. 

To be young is surely the best, if the most precarious, gift 
of life ; yet there are some of us who would hardly consent to be 
young again, if it were at the cost of our recollection of Mr. 
Emerson's first lectures during the consulate of Van Buren. 
We used to walk in from the country to the Masonic Temple 
(I think it was), through the crisp winter night, and listen to 
that thrilling voice of his, so charged with subtle meaning and 
subtle music, as shipwrecked men on a raft to the hail of a ship 
that came with unhoped-for food and rescue. Cynics might 
say what they liked. Did our own imaginations transfigure 
dry remainder-biscuit 1 into ambrosia? At any rate, he brought 
us life, which, on the whole, is no bad thing. Was it all trans- 
cendentalism? magic-lantern pictures on mist? As you will. 
Those, then, were just what we wanted. But it was not so. 
-The delight and the benefit were that he put us in communica- 
tion with a larger style of thought, sharpened our wits with a 
more pungent phrase, gave us ravishing glimpses of an ideal 
under the dry husk of our New England ; made us conscious of 
the supreme and everlasting originality of whatever bit of soul 
might be in any of us; freed us, in short, from the stocks of 
prose in which we had sat so long that we had grown well-nigh 
contented in our cramps. And who that saw the audience will 
ever forget it, where every one still capable of fire, or longing 
to renew in himself the half -forgotten sense of it, was gathered? 
Those faces, young and old, agleam with pale intellectual light, 
eager with pleased attention, flash upon me once more from 
the deep recesses of the years with an exquisite pathos. Ah, 
beautiful young eyes, brimming with love and hope, wholly 
vanished now in that other world we call the Past, or peering 
doubtfully through the pensive gloaming of memory, your 
light impoverishes these cheaper days ! I hear again that rustle 
of sensation, as they turned to exchange glances over some 
pithier thought, some keener flash of that humor which always 
played about the horizon of his mind like heat-lightning, and 
it seems now like the sad whisper of the autumn leaves that are 
1 As You Like It, n, vii. 



EMERSON THE LECTURER 511 

whirling around me. But would my picture be complete if I 

forgot that ample and vegete countenance of Mr. R of 

W , — how, from its regular post at the corner of the front 

bench, it turned in ruddy triumph to the profaner audience 
as if he were the inexplicably appointed fugleman of apprecia- 
tion? I was reminded of him by those hearty cherubs in Titian's 
Assumption that look at you as who should say, "Did you ever 
see a Madonna like that ? Did you ever behold one hundred 
and fifty pounds of womanhood mount heavenward before like 
a rocket?" 

To some of us that long-past experience remains as the most 
marvellous and fruitful we have ever had. Emerson awakened 
us, saved us from the body of this death. It is the sound of 
the trumpet that the young soul longs for, careless what 
breath may fill it. Sidney heard it in the ballad of "Chevy 
Chase," and we in Emerson. Nor did it blow retreat, but called 
to us with assurance of victory. Did they say he was discon- 
nected? So were the stars, that seemed larger to our eyes, still 
keen with that excitement, as we walked homeward with 
prouder stride over the creaking snow. And were they not knit 
together by a higher logic than our mere sense could master? 
Were we enthusiasts? I hope and believe we were, and am 
thankful to the man who made us worth something for once in 
our lives. If asked what was left? what we carried home? we 
should not have been careful for an answer. It would have been 
enough if we had said that something beautiful had passed - 
that way. Or we might have asked in return what one brought 
away from a symphony of Beethoven? Enough that he had 
set that ferment of wholesome discontent at work in us. There - 
is one, at least, of those old hearers, so many of whom are now 
in the fruition of that intellectual beauty of which Emerson 
gave them both the desire and the foretaste, who will always 
love to repeat : — 

"Che in la mente m' e fitta, ed or m' accuora 
La cara e buona immagine paterna 
Di voi, quando nel mondo ad ora ad ora 
M' insegnavaste come V uom s' eterna." l 

1 Dante's Inferno, xv, lines 82-85. In Longfellow's translation: — 
"For in my mind is fixed, and touches now 

My heart, the dear and good paternal image 
Of you, when in the world from hour to hour 
You taught me how a man becomes eternal." 



5 i2 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

I am unconsciously thinking, as I write, of the third lecture 
of the present course, in which Mr. Emerson gave some de- 
lightful reminiscences of the intellectual influences in whose 
movement he had shared. It was like hearing Goethe read 
some passages of the Wahrheit aus seinem Leben. 1 Not that 
there was not a little Dichtung, too, here and there, as the lec- 
turer built up so lofty a pedestal under certain figures as to lift 
them into a prominence of obscurity, and seem to masthead 
them there. Everybody was asking his neighbor who this or 
that recondite great man was, in the faint hope that somebody 
might once have heard of him. There are those who call Mr. 
Emerson cold. Let them revise their judgment in presence of 
this loyalty of his that can keep warm for half a century, that 
never forgets a friendship, or fails to pay even a fancied obliga- 
tion to the uttermost farthing. This substantiation of shadows 
was but incidental, and pleasantly characteristic of the man to 
those who know and love him. The greater part of the lecture 
was devoted to reminiscences of things substantial in them- 
selves. He spoke of Everett, fresh from Greece and Germany; 
of Channing; of the translations of Margaret Fuller, Ripley, 
and D wight; of the Dial and Brook Farm. To what he said of 
the latter an undertone of good-humored irony gave special 
zest. But what every one of his hearers felt was that the pro- 
tagonist in the drama was left out. The lecturer was no JEneas 
to babble the quorum magna parsfui, 2 and, as one of his listen- 
ers, I cannot help wishing to say how each of them was com- 
menting the story as it went along, and filling up the necessary 
gaps in it from his own private store of memories. His younger 
hearers could not know how much they owed to the benign 
impersonality, the quiet scorn of everything ignoble, the never- 
sated hunger of self-culture, that were personified in the man 
before them. But the older knew how much the country's in- 
tellectual emancipation was due to the stimulus of his teaching 
and example, how constantly he had kept burning the beacon 
of an ideal life above our lower region of turmoil. To him more 
than to all other causes together did the young martyrs of our 
civil war owe the sustaining strength of thoughtful heroism 
that is so touching in every record of their lives. Those who 

1 The full title is Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and 
Truth from My Life). 

2 "In these events I had a great share." , 



EMERSON THE LECTURER 513 

are grateful to Mr. Emerson, as many of us are, for what they 
feel to be most valuable in their culture, or perhaps I should 
say their impulse, are grateful not so much for any direct 
teachings of his as for that inspiring lift which only genius can 
give, and without which all doctrine is chaff. 

This was something like the caret which some of us older 
boys wished to fill up on the margin of the master's lecture. 
Few man have been so much to so many, and through so large 
a range of aptitudes and temperaments, and this simply be- 
cause all of us value manhood beyond any or all other qualities 
of character. We may suspect in him, here and there, a certain 
thinness and vagueness of quality, but let the waters go over 
him as they list, this masculine fibre of his will keep its lively 
color and its toughness of texture. I have heard some great 
speakers and some accomplished orators, but never any that 
so moved and persuaded men as he. There is a kind of under- 
tow in that rich baritone of his that sweeps our minds from their 
foothold into deeper waters with a drift we cannot and would 
not resist. And how artfully (for Emerson is a long-studied 
artist in these things) does the deliberate utterance, that seems 
waiting for the fit word, appear to admit us partners in the 
labor of thought and make us feel as if the glance of humor 
were a sudden suggestion, as if the perfect phrase lying written 
there on the desk were as unexpected to him as to us ! In that 
closely filed speech of his at the Burns centenary dinner, every 
word seemed to have just dropped down to him from the clouds. 
He looked far away over the heads of his hearers, with a vague 
kind of expectation, as into some private heaven of invention, 
and the winged period came at last obedient to his spell. "My 
dainty Ariel!" 1 he seemed murmuring to himself as he cast 
down his eyes as if in deprecation of the frenzy of approval 
and caught another sentence from the Sibylline leaves that lay 
before him, ambushed behind a dish of fruit and seen only by 
nearest neighbors. Every sentence brought down the house, as 
I never saw one brought down before, — and it is not so easy 
to hit Scotsmen with a sentiment that has no hint of native 
brogue in it. I watched, for it was an interesting study, how 
the quick sympathy ran flashing from face to face down the 
long tables, like an electric spark thrilling as it went, and then 
1 The magician Prospero to the spirit Ariel in the Tempest, v, i. 



5 i4 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

exploded in a thunder of plaudits. I watched till tables and 
faces vanished, for I, too, found myself caught up in the com- 
mon enthusiasm, and my excited fancy set me under the bema 1 
listening to him who fulmined over Greece. I can never help 
applying to him what Ben Jonson said of Bacon: " There hap- 
pened in my time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity 
in his speaking. His language was nobly censorious. No man 
ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suf- 
fered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No mem- 
ber of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers 
could not cough, or look aside from him, without loss. He com- 
manded where he spoke." Those who heard him while their 
natures were yet plastic, and their mental nerves trembled 
under the slightest breath of divine air, will never cease to feel 
and say: — 

"Was never eye did see that face, 

Was never ear did hear that tongue, 
Was never mind did mind his grace, 

That ever thought the travail long; 
But eyes, and ears, and every thought, 
Were with his sweet perfections caught." 

THOREAU 2 

What contemporary, if he was in the righting period of his 
life (since Nature sets limits about her conscription for spiritual 
fields, as the state does in physical warfare), will ever forget 
what was somewhat vaguely called the "Transcendental Move- 
ment" of thirty years ago? Apparently set astir by Carlyle's 
essays on the Signs of the Times, and on History, the final and 
more immediate impulse seemed to be given by Sartor Resartus. 
At least the republication in Boston of that wonderful Abraham 
a, Sancta Clara sermon on Falstaff 's text of the miserable forked 
radish 3 gave the signal for a sudden mental and moral mutiny. 

1 Rostrum; "him" doubtless refers to Demosthenes. 

2 First published in the North American Review, 1865. This essay is generally 
regarded as brilliant but unsound — the latter chiefly because Thoreau is 
attacked for his failure in an experiment which he never really made. 

3 The reference is, in general, to Sartor Resartus; in particular, to Carlyle's 
quotation from 2 Henry IV, in, ii, — "a forked Radish with a head fantastically 
carved." (Chapter entitled "Adamitism.") Abraham a, Sancta Clara, whose 
real name was Ulrich Megerle or Megerlin (1644-1709), was an Augustinian 
monk and court preacher at Vienna. 



THOREAU 515 

Ecce nunc tempus acceptabilel 1 was shouted on all hands with 
every variety of emphasis, and by voices of every conceivable 
pitch, representing the three sexes of men, women, and Lady 
Mary Wortley Montagues. The nameless eagle of the tree 
Ygdrasil was about to sit at last, and wild-eyed enthusiasts 
rushed from all sides, each eager to thrust under the mystic 
bird that chalk egg from which the new and fairer Creation 
was to be hatched in due time. Redeunt Saturnia regno,, 2 — so 
far was certain, though in what shape, or by what methods, 
was still a matter of debate. Every possible form of intellectual 
and physical dyspepsia brought forth its gospel. Bran had its 
prophets, and the presartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs, 
tailored impromptu from the tar-pot by incensed neighbors, 
and sent forth to illustrate the "feathered Mercury," as defined 
by Webster and Worcester. Plainness of speech was carried to 
a pitch that would have taken away the breath of George Fox; 
and even swearing had its evangelists, who answered a simple 
inquiry after their health with an elaborate ingenuity of im- 
precation that might have been honorably mentioned by 
Marlborough in general orders. Everybody had a mission 
(with a capital M) to attend to everybody else's business. No 
brain but had its private maggot, which must have found piti- 
ably short commons sometimes. Not a few impecunious zealots 
abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people), pro- 
fessing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. Some had 
an assurance of instant millennium so soon as hooks and eyes 
should be substituted for buttons. Communities were estab- 
lished where everything was to be common but common sense. 
Men renounced their old gods, and hesitated only whether to 
bestow their furloughed allegiance on Thor or Budh. Conven- 
tions were held for every hitherto inconceivable purpose. The 
belated gift of tongues, as among the Fifth Monarchy men, 
spread like a contagion, rendering its victims incomprehensible 
to all Christian men; whether equally so to the most distant 
possible heathen or not was unexperimented, though many 
would have subscribed liberally that a fair trial might be made. 
It was the pentecost of Shinar. The day of utterances repro- 

1 " Behold now the acceptable time! " 

2 "The reign of Saturn returns" (Virgil's Fourth Eclogue) — the inauguration 
of a new Golden Age. 



516 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

duced the day of rebuses and anagrams, and there was nothing 
so simple that uncial letters and the style of Diphilus the 
Labyrinth could not turn it into a riddle. Many foreign revo- 
lutionists out of work added to the general misunderstanding 
their contribution of broken English in every most ingenious 
form of fracture. All stood ready at a moment's notice to 
reform everything but themselves. The general motto was : — 

"And we'll talk with them, too, 
And take upon 's the mystery of things 
As if we were God's spies." 

Nature is always kind enough to give even her clouds a 
humorous lining. I have barely hinted at the comic side of the 
affair, for the material was endless. This was the whistle and 
trailing fuse of the shell, but there was a very solid and serious 
kernel, full of the most deadly explosiveness. Thoughtful men 
divined it, but the generality suspected nothing. The word 
" transcendental" then was the maid of all work for those who 
could not think, as "Pre-Raphaelite" has been more recently 
for people of the same limited housekeeping. The truth is, that 
there was a much nearer metaphysical relation and a much 
more distant aesthetic and literary relation between Carlyle 
and the Apostles of the Newness, as they were called in New 
England, than has commonly been supposed. Both represented 
the reaction and revolt against Philisterei, 1 a renewal of the 
old battle begun in modern times by Erasmus and Reuchlin, 
and continued by Lessing, Goethe, and, in a far narrower sense, 
by Heine in Germany, and of which Fielding, Sterne, and 
Wordsworth in different ways have been the leaders in Eng- 
land. It was simply a struggle for fresh air, in which, if the 
windows could not be opened, there was danger that panes 
would be broken, though painted with images of saints and 
martyrs. Light, colored by these reverend effigies, was none 
the more respirable for being picturesque. There is only one- 
thing better than tradition, and that is the original and eternal 
life out of which all tradition takes its rise. It was this life 
which the reformers demanded, with more or less clearness of 
consciousness and expression, life in politics, life in literature, 
life in religion. Of what use to import a gospel from Judaea, if 

1 Philistinism. , 



THOREAU 517 

we leave behind the soul that made it possible, the God who 
keeps it forever real and present? Surely Abana and Pharpar 
are better than Jordan, 1 if a living faith be mixed with those 
waters and none with these. 

Scotch Presbyterianism as a motive of spiritual progress 
was dead; New England Puritanism was in like manner dead; 
in other words, Protestantism had made its fortune and no 
longer protested; but till Carlyle spoke out in the Old World 
and Emerson in the New, no one had dared to proclaim, Le roi 
est mort: vive le roi ! 2 The meaning of which proclamation was 
essentially this: the vital spirit has long since departed out of 
this form once so kingly, and the great seal has been in com- 
mission long enough; but meanwhile the soul of man, from- 
which all power emanates and to which it reverts, still survives 
in undiminished royalty; God still survives, little as you gentle- 
men of the Commission seem to be aware of it, — nay, will 
possibly outlive the whole of you, incredible as it may appear. 
The truth is, that both Scotch Presbyterianism and New 
England Puritanism made their new avatar in Carlyle and 
Emerson, the heralds of their formal decease, and the tendency 
of the one toward Authority and of the other toward Independ- 
ency might have been prophesied by whoever had studied his- 
tory. The necessity was not so much in the men as in the prin- 
ciples they represented and the traditions which overruled 
them. The Puritanism of the past found its unwilling poet in 
Hawthorne, the rarest creative imagination of the century, the 
rarest in some ideal respects since Shakespeare; but the Puri- 
tanism that cannot die, the Puritanism that made New England 
what it is, and is destined to make America what it should be, 
found its voice in Emerson. Though holding himself aloof from 
all active partnership in movements of reform, he has been the 
sleeping partner who has supplied a great part of their capital. 

The artistic range of Emerson is narrow, as every well-read 
critic must feel at once; and so is that of ^Eschylus, so is that of 
Dante, so is that of Montaigne, so is that of Schiller, so is that 
of nearly every one except Shakespeare; but there is a gauge 
of height no less than of breadth, of individuality as well as 
of comprehensiveness, and, above all, there is the standard of 
genetic power, the test of the masculine as distinguished from 

1 2 Kings v, 12. * "The King is dead: long live the King!" 



518 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL' 

the receptive minds. There are staminate plants in literature 
that make no fine show of fruit, but without whose pollen, 
quintessence of fructifying gold, the garden had been barren. 
Emerson's mind is emphatically one of these, and there is no 
man to whom our aesthetic culture owes so much. The Puritan 
revolt had made us ecclesiastically and the Revolution politi- 
cally independent, but we were still socially and intellectually 
moored to English thought, till Emerson cut the cable and gave 
us a chance at the dangers and the glories of blue water. No 
man young enough to have felt it can forget or cease to be 
grateful for the mental and moral nudge which he received 
from the writings of his high-minded and brave-spirited coun- 
tryman. That we agree with him, or that he always agrees 
with himself, is aside from the question; but that he arouses 
in us something that we are the better for having awakened, - 
whether that something be of opposition or assent, that he 
speaks always to what is highest and least selfish in us, few 
Americans of the generation younger than his own would be 
disposed to deny. His oration before the Phi Beta Kappa 
Society at Cambridge, some thirty years ago, was an event 
without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to 
be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and 
its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what win- 
dows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, 
what grim silence of foregone dissent! It was our Yankee ver- 
sion of a lecture by Abelard, our Harvard parallel to the last 
public appearances of Schelling. 

I said that the Transcendental Movement was the protestant 
spirit of Puritanism seeking a new outlet and an escape from 
forms and creeds which compressed rather than expressed it. 
In its motives, its preaching, and its results, it differed radically 
from the doctrine of Carlyle. The Scotchman, with all his 
genius, and his humor gigantesque as that of Rabelais, has 
grown shriller and shriller with years, degenerating sometimes 
into a common scold, and emptying very unsavory vials of 
wrath on the head of the sturdy British Socrates of worldly 
common sense. The teaching of Emerson tended much more 
exclusively to self-culture and the independent development 
of the individual man. It seemed to many almost Pythagorean 
in its voluntary seclusion from commonwealth affairs. Both 



THOREAU 519 

Carlyle and Emerson were disciples of Goethe, but Emerson 
in a far truer sense; and while the one, from his bias toward the 
eccentric, has degenerated more and more into mannerism, 
the other has clarified steadily toward perfection of style, — 
exquisite fineness of material, unobtrusive lowness of tone and 
simplicity of fashion, the most high-bred garb of expression. 
Whatever may be said of his thought, nothing can be finer than 
the delicious limpidness of his phrase. If it was ever question- 
able whether democracy could develop a gentleman, the prob- 
lem has been affirmatively solved at last. Carlyle, in his cyni- 
cism and his admiration of force in and for itself, has become at 
last positively inhuman; Emerson, reverencing strength, seek- 
ing the highest outcome of the individual, has found that soci- 
ety and politics are also main elements in the attainment of the 
desired end, and has drawn steadily manward and world ward. 
The two men represent respectively those grand personifica- 
tions in the drama of ^Eschylus, But and K/pcito?. 1 

Among the pistillate plants kindled to fruitage by the 
Emersonian pollen, Thoreau is thus far the most remarkable; 
and it is something eminently fitting that his posthumous 
works should be offered us by Emerson, for they are strawber- 
ries from his own garden. A singular mixture of varieties, in- 
deed, there is; — alpine, some of them, with the flavor of rare 
mountain air; others wood, tasting of sunny roadside banks or 
shy openings in the forest; and not a few seedlings swollen 
hugely by culture, but lacking the fine natural aroma of the 
more modest kinds. Strange books these are of his, and inter- 
esting in many ways, — instructive chiefly as showing how 
considerable a crop may be raised on a comparatively narrow 
close of mind, and how much a man may make of his life if he 
will assiduously follow it, though perhaps never truly finding 
it at last. 

I have just been renewing my recollection of Mr. Thoreau's 
writings, and have read through his six volumes in the order of 
their production. I shall try to give an adequate report of their 
impression upon me both as critic and as mere reader. He 
seems to me to have been a man with so high a conceit of him- 
self that he accepted without questioning, and insisted on our 
accepting, his defects and weaknesses of character as virtues 
1 Strength and Force, in Prometheus Bound. 



5 20 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

and powers peculiar to himself. Was he indolent, he finds none 
of the activities which attract or employ the rest of mankind 
worthy of him. Was he wanting in the qualities that make suc- 
cess, it is success that is contemptible, and not himself that 
lacks persistency and purpose. Was he poor, money was an 
unmixed evil. Did his life seem a selfish one, he condemns doing 
good as one of the weakest of superstitions. To be of use was 
with him the most killing bait of the wily tempter Uselessness. * 
He had no faculty of generalization from outside of himself, 
or at least no experience which would supply the material of 
such, and he makes his own whim the law, his own range the 
horizon of the universe. He condemns a world, the hollowness 
of whose satisfactions he had never had the means of testing, 
and we recognize Apemantus behind the mask of Timon. 1 He 
had little active imagination; of the receptive he had much. 
His appreciation is of the highest quality; his critical power, 
from want of continuity of mind, very limited and inadequate. 
He somewhere cites a simile from Ossian, as an example of the 
superiority of the old poetry to the new, though, even were the 
historic evidence less convincing, the sentimental melancholy 
of those poems should be conclusive of their modernness. He 
had none of the artistic mastery which controls a great work 
to the serene balance of completeness, but exquisite mechanical 
skill in the shaping of sentences and paragraphs, or (more 
rarely) short bits of verse for the expression of a detached 
thought, sentiment, or image. His works give one the feeling 
of a sky full of stars, — something impressive and exhilarating 
certainly, something high overhead and freckled thickly with 
spots of isolated brightness; but whether these have any mu- 
tual relation with each other, or have any concern with our 
mundane matters, is for the most part matter of conjecture, — 
astrology as yet, and not astronomy. 

It is curious, considering what Thoreau afterwards became, 
that he was not by nature an observer. He only saw the things 
he looked for, and was less poet than naturalist. Till he built 
his Walden shanty, he did not know that the hickory grew in 
Concord. Till he went to Maine, he had never seen phosphores- 
cent wood, a phenomenon early familiar to most country boys. 

1 Apemantus is the churlish philosopher, Timon the cynical hero, of Shake- 
speare's Timon of Athens. 



THOREAU 521 

At forty he speaks of the seeding of the pine as a new discovery, 
though one should have thought that its gold-dust of blowing 
pollen might have earlier -drawn his eye. Neither his attention 
nor his genius was of the spontaneous kind. He discovered 
nothing. He thought everything a discovery of his own, from 
moonlight to the planting of acorns and nuts by squirrels. This 
is a defect in his character, but one of his chief charms as a 
writer. Everything grows fresh under his hand. He delved in 
his mind and nature; he planted them with all manner of native 
and foreign seeds, and reaped assiduously. He was not merely 
solitary, he would be isolated, and succeeded at last in almost 
persuading himself that he was autochthonous. He valued 
everything in proportion as he fancied it to be exclusively his 
own. He complains in Walden that there is no one in Concord 
with whom he could talk of Oriental literature, though the 
man was living within two miles of his hut who had introduced 
him to it. This intellectual selfishness becomes sometimes 
almost painful in reading him. He lacked that generosity of 
"communication" which Johnson admired in Burke. De 
Quincey tells us that Wordsworth was impatient when any one 
else spoke of mountains, as if he had a peculiar property in 
them. And we can readily understand why it should be so: 
no one is satisfied with another's appreciation of his mistress. 
But Thoreau seems to have prized a lofty way of thinking 
(often we should be inclined to call it a remote one) not so 
much because it was good in itself as because he wished few to 
share it with him. It seems now and then as if he did not seek 
to lure others up "above our lower region of turmoil," but to 
leave his own name cut on the mountain peak as the first 
climber. This itch of originality infects his thought and style. - 
To be misty is not to be mystic. He turns commonplaces end 
for end, and fancies it makes something new of them. As we 
walk down Park Street, 1 our eye is caught by Dr. Winship's 
dumb-bells, one of which bears an inscription testifying that it 
is the heaviest ever put up at arm's length by any athlete; 
and in reading Mr. Thoreau's books we cannot help feeling as 
if he sometimes invited our attention to a particular sophism 
or paradox as the biggest yet maintained by any single writer. 
He seeks, at all risks, for perversity of thought, and revives the 

1 Boston. 



522 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

age of concetti 1 while he fancies himself going back to a pre- 
classical nature. "A day/' he says, "passed in the society of 
those Greek sages, such as described in the 'Banquet' of 
Xenophon, would not be comparable with the dry wit of de- 
cayed cranberry-vines and the fresh Attic salt of the moss- 
beds." It is not so much the True that he loves as the Out-of- 
the-Way. As the Brazen Age shows itself in other men by 
exaggeration of phrase, so in him by extravagance of state- 
ment. He wishes always to trump your suit and to ruff when 
you least expect it. Do you love Nature because she is beauti- 
ful? He will find a better argument in her ugliness. Are you 
tired of the artificial man? He instantly dresses you up an 
ideal in a Penobscot Indian, and attributes to this creature of 
his otherwise-mindedness as peculiarities things that are com- 
mon to all woodsmen, white or red, and this simply because he 
has not studied the pale-faced variety. 

This notion of an absolute originality, as if one could have 
a patent-right in it, is an absurdity. A man cannot escape in 
thought, any more than he can in language, from the past and 
the present. As no one ever invents a word, and yet language 
somehow grows by general contribution and necessity, so it is 
with thought. Mr. Thoreau seems to me to insist in public on 
going back to flint and steel, when there is a match-box in his 
pocket which he knows very well how to use at a pinch. 
Originality consists in power of digesting and assimilating 
thoughts, so that they become part of our life and substance. 
Montaigne, for example, is one of the most original of authors, 
though he helped himself to ideas in every direction. But they 
turn to blood and coloring in his style, and give a freshness of 
complexion that is forever charming. In Thoreau much seems 
yet to be foreign and unassimilated, showing itself in symp- 
toms of indigestion. A preacher-up of Nature, we now and 
then detect under the surly and stoic garb something of the 
sophist and the sentimentalizer. I am far from implying that 
this was conscious on his part. But it is much easier for a man 
to impose on himself when he measures only with himself. A 
greater familiarity with ordinary men would have done Tho- 
reau good, by showing him how many fine qualities are common 
to the race. The radical vice of his theory of life was that he 

1 Conceits. 



THOREAU 523 

confounded physical with spiritual remoteness from men. A 
man is far enough withdrawn from his fellows if he keep himself 
clear of their weaknesses. He is not so truly withdrawn as 
exiled, if he refuse to share in their strength. " Solitude," says 
Cowley, "can be well fitted and set right bat upon a very few 
persons. They must have enough knowledge of the world to 
see the vanity of it, and enough virtue to despise all vanity." 
It is a morbid self-consciousness that pronounces the world of 
men empty and worthless before trying it, the instinctive eva- 
sion of one who is sensible of some innate weakness, and retorts 
the accusation of it before any has made it but himself. To a 
healthy mind, the world is a constant challenge of opportunity. 
Mr. Thoreau had not a healthy mind, or he would not have 
been so fond of prescribing. His whole life was a search for the 
doctor. The old mystics had a wiser sense of what the world 
was worth. They ordained a severe apprenticeship to law, and 
even ceremonial, in order to the gaining of freedom and mas- 
tery over these. Seven years of service for Rachel were to be 
rewarded at last with Leah. 1 Seven other years of faithfulness 
with her were to win them at last the true bride of their souls. 
Active Life was with them the only path to the Contemplative. 
Thoreau had no humor, and this implies that he was a sorry 
logician. Himself an artist in rhetoric, he confounds thought 
with style when he undertakes to speak of the latter. He was 
forever talking of getting away from the world, but he must 
be always near enough to it, nay, to the Concord corner of it, 
to feel the impression he makes there. He verifies the shrewd 
remark of Sainte-Beuve, "On touche encore a son temps et 
tres-fort, meme quand on le repousse." 2 This egotism of his is 
a Stylites pillar 3 after all, a seclusion which keeps him in the 
public eye. The dignity of man is an excellent thing, but 
therefore to hold one's self too sacred and precious is the reverse 
of excellent. There is something delightfully absurd in six 
volumes addressed to a world of such "vulgar fellows" as 
Thoreau affirmed his fellow men to be. I once had a glimpse of 
a genuine solitary who spent his winters one hundred and fifty 

1 Genesis xxix, 18-25. 

2 "One is strongly attracted to one's time, even when one repulses it." 
1 " Patient on this tall pillar I have borne 

Rain, wind, frost, heat, hail, damp, and sleet, and snow." 

(Tennyson's "St. Simeon Stylites," a type of the "pillar saints.") 



524 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

miles beyond all human communication, and there dwelt with 
his rifle as his only confidant. Compared with this, the shanty 
on Walden Pond has something the air, it must be confessed, 
of the Hermitage of La Chevrette. 1 I do not believe that the 
way to a true cosmopolitanism 'carries one into the woods or 
the society of musquashes. Perhaps the narrowest provincial- 
ism is that of Self; that of Kleinwinkel 2 is nothing to it. The 
natural man, like the singing birds, comes out of the forest as 
inevitably as the natural bear and the wildcat stick there. To 
seek to be natural implies a consciousness that forbids all 
naturalness forever. It is as easy — and no easier — to be 
natural in a salon as in a swamp, if one do not aim at it, for 
what we call unnaturalness always has its spring in a man's 
thinking too much about himself. "It is impossible," said 
Turgot, "for a vulgar man to be simple." 

I look upon a great deal of the modern sentimentalism about 
Nature as a mark of disease. It is one more symptom of the 
general liver-complaint. To a man of wholesome constitution 
the wilderness is well enough for a mood or a vacation, but not 
for a habit of life. Those who have most loudly advertised their 
passion for seclusion and their intimacy with Nature, from 
Petrarch down, have been mostly sentimentalists, unreal men, 
misanthropes on the spindle side, solacing an uneasy suspicion 
of themselves by professing contempt for their kind. They 
make demands on the world in advance proportioned to their 
inward measure of their own merit, and are angry that the 
world pays only by the visible measure of performance. It is 
true of Rousseau, the modern founder of the sect, true of Saint 
Pierre, his intellectual child, and of Chateaubriand, his grand- 
child, the inventor, we might almost say, of the primitive for- 
est, and who first was touched by the solemn falling of a tree 
from natural decay in the windless silence of the woods. It is 
a very shallow view that affirms trees and rocks to be healthy, 
and cannot see that men in communities are just as true to the 
laws of their organization and destiny; that can tolerate the 
puffin and the fox, but not the fool and the knave; that would 
shun politics because of its demagogues, and snuff up the stench 
of the obscene fungus. The divine life of Nature is more won- 

1 An attractive cottage which Mme. d'Epinay furnished for Rousseau. 

2 "Little-corner." 



THOREAU 525 

derful, more various, more sublime in man than in any other 
of her works, and the wisdom that is gained by commerce with 
men, as Montaigne and Shakespeare gained it, or with one's 
own soul among men, as Dante, is the most delightful, as it is 
the most precious, of all. In outward nature it is still man that 
interests us, and we care far less for the things seen than the 
way in which they are seen by poetic eyes like Wordsworth's 
or Thoreau's, and the reflections they cast there. To hear the 
to-do that is often made over the simple fact that a man sees 
the image of himself in the outward world, one is reminded of a 
savage when he for the first time catches a glimpse of himself in 
a looking-glass. "Venerable child of Nature," we are tempted 
to say, "to whose science in the invention of the tobacco-pipe, 
to whose art in the tattooing of thine undegenerate hide not 
yet enslaved by tailors, we are slowly striving to climb back, 
the miracle thou beholdest is sold in my unhappy country for 
a shilling!" If matters go on as they have done, and every- 
body must needs blab of all the favors that have been done him 
by roadside and river-brink and woodland walk, as if to kiss 
and tell were no longer treachery, it will be a positive refresh- 
ment to meet a man who is as superbly indifferent to Nature 
as she is to him. By and by we shall have John Smith, of No. 
-12 -12th Street, advertising that he is not the J. S. who saw a 
cow-lily on Thursday last, as he never saw one in his life, would 
not see one if he could, and is prepared to prove an alibi on the 
day in question. 

t Solitary communion with Nature does not seem to have 
been sanitary or sweetening in its influence on Thoreau's char- 
acter. On the contrary, his letters show him more cynical as 
he grew older. While he studied with respectful attention the 
minks and woodchucks, his neighbors, he looked with utter 
contempt on the august drama of destiny of which his country 
was the scene, and on which the curtain had already risen. He 
was converting us back to a state of nature "so eloquently," as 
Voltaire said of Rousseau, "that he almost persuaded us to go 
on all fours," while the wiser fates were making it possible for 
us to walk erect for the first time. Had he conversed more with 
his fellows, his sympathies would have widened with the assur- 
ance that his peculiar genius had more appreciation, and his 
writings a larger circle of readers, or at least a warmer one, than 



526 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

he dreamed of. We have the highest testimony 1 to the natural 
sweetness, sincerity, and nobleness of his temper, and in his 
books an equally irrefragable one to the rare quality of his 
mind. He was not a strong thinker, but a sensitive feeler. Yet 
his mind strikes us as cold and wintry in its purity. A light 
snow has fallen everywhere in which he seems to come on the 
track of the shier sensations that would elsewhere leave no 
trace. We think greater compression would have done more 
for his fame. A feeling of sameness comes over us as we read 
so much. Trifles are recorded with an over-minute punctuality 
and conscientiousness of detail. He registers the state of his 
personal thermometer thirteen times a day. We cannot help 
thinking sometimes of the man who 

"Watches, starves, freezes, and sweats — 
To learn but catechisms and alphabets 
Of unconcerning things, matters of fact," 

and sometimes of the saying of the Persian poet, that "when 
the owl would boast, he boasts of catching mice at the edge of 
a hole." We could readily part with some of his affectations. 
It was well enough for Pythagoras to say, once for all, "When I 
was Euphorbus at the siege of Troy"; not so well for Thoreau 
to travesty it into "When I was a shepherd on the plains of 
Assyria." A na'ive thing said over again is anything but naive. 
But with every exception, there is no writing comparable with 
Thoreau's in kind, that is comparable with it in degree where 
it is best; where it disengages itself, that is, from the tangled 
roots and dead leaves of a second-hand Orientalism, and runs 
limpid and smooth and broadening as it runs, a mirror for 
whatever is grand and lovely in both worlds. 

George Sand says neatly, that "Art is not a study of posi- 
tive reality" {actuality were the fitter word), "but a seeking 
after ideal truth." It would be doing very inadequate justice 
to Thoreau if we left it to be inferred that this ideal element - 
did not exist in him, and that too in larger proportion, if less 
obtrusive, than his nature-worship. He took nature as the 
mountain-path to an ideal world. If the path wind a good deal, 
if he record too faithfully every trip over a root, if he botanize 
somewhat wearisomely, he gives us now and then superb out- 

1 Mr. Emerson, in the Biographical Sketch prefixed to the Excursions. 
[Author's note.] 



THOREAU 527 

looks from some jutting crag, and brings us out at last into an 
illimitable ether, where the breathing is not difficult for those 
who have any true touch of the climbing spirit. His shanty- 
life was a mere impossibility, so far as his own conception of 
it goes, as an entire independency of mankind. The tub of 
Diogenes had a sounder bottom. Thoreau's experiment actu- 
ally presupposed all that complicated civilization which it 
theoretically abjured. He squatted on another man's land; he 
borrows an axe; his boards, his nails, his bricks, his mortar, 
his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough, his hoe, all turn 
state's evidence against him as an accomplice in the sin of that 
artificial civilization which rendered it possible that such a 
person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all. Magnis tamen 
excidit ausis. 1 His aim was a noble and a useful one, in the 
direction of "plain living and high thinking." It was a practi- 
cal sermon on Emerson's text that " things are in the saddle and 
ride mankind," 2 an attempt to solve Carlyle's problem (con- 
densed from Johnson) of "lessening your denominator." 3 His 
whole life was a rebuke of the waste and aimlessness of our 
American luxury, which is an abject enslavement to tawdry 
upholstery. He had "fine translunary things" 4 in him. His 
better style as a writer is in keeping with the simplicity and 
purity of his life. We have said that his range was narrow, but 
to be a master is to be a master. He had caught his English 
at its living source, among the poets and prose-writers of its 
best days; his literature was extensive and recondite; his quo- 
tations are always nuggets of the purest ore : there are sentences 
of his as perfect as anything in the language, and thoughts as 
clearly crystallized; his metaphors and images are always 
fresh from the soil; he had watched Nature like a detective 
who is to go upon the stand; as we read him, it seems as if all- 
out-of-doors had kept a diary and become its own Montaigne; 
we look at the landscape as in a Claude Lorraine 5 glass; com- 
pared with his, all other books of similar aim, even White's 
Selborne, 6 seem dry as a country clergyman's meteorological 

1 "Although he dared great things, yet he died." 

2 See Emerson's "Ode," in Poems, p. 78, Centenary Edition. 

3 See Sartor Res artus, -chapter entitled "The Everlasting Yea." 

4 "Brave translunary things." (Donne's "Dedication of Eleonora.") 
6 Claude Gelee (1600-82), a French painter of landscapes. 

6 The Natural History of Selbome, by Gilbert White (1720-93). 



528 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

journal in an old almanac. He belongs with Donne and Browne 
and Novalis; if not with the originally creative men, with the 
scarcely smaller class who are peculiar, and whose leaves shed 
their invisible thought-seed like ferns. 



DANTE 1 

Like all great artistic minds, Dante was essentially conserv- 
ative, and, arriving precisely in that period of transition when 
Church and Empire were entering upon the modern epoch of 
thought, he strove to preserve both by presenting the theory 
of both in a pristine and ideal perfection. The whole nature of 
Dante was one of intense belief. There is proof upon proof that 
he believed himself invested with a divine mission. Like the 
Hebrew prophets, with whose writings his whole soul was im- 
bued, it was back to the old worship and the God of the fathers 
that he called his people; and not Isaiah himself was more 
destitute of that humor, that sense of ludicrous contrast, which 
is an essential in the composition of a sceptic. In Dante's time, 
learning had something of a sacred character; the line was 
hardly yet drawn between the clerk and the possessor of super- 
natural powers; it was with the next generation, with the ele- 
gant Petrarch, even more truly than with the kindly Boccaccio, 
that the purely literary life, and that dilettantism, which is 
the twin sister of scepticism, began. As a merely literary figure, 
the position of Dante is remarkable. Not only as respects 
thought, but as respects aesthetics also, his great poem stands 
as a monument on the boundary line between the ancient and 
modern. He not only marks, but is in himself, the transition. 
Arma virumgue cano, that is the motto of classic song; 2 the 
things of this world and great men. Dante says, subjectum est 
homo, not vir; my theme is man, not a man. The scene of the 

1 Though published in the North American Review of July, 1872, as a review 
of The Shadow of Dante, by Maria Francesca Rossetti, Lowell's "Dante" is to 
be regarded as the culmination of twenty years of ardent study and teaching. 
"It was in the teaching of Dante that Lowell made the strongest impression on 
the students who gathered about him, if we may judge by the reminiscences 
which more than one has printed." (Horace E. Scudder, James Russell Lowell. 
11, p. 385.) In the Riverside Edition of Lowell's Prose Works, the essay runs to 
147 pages. The passages wanting in the present text are concerned mainly with 
an interpretation of Dante's life and works, especially the Divina Commedia. 

2 Virgil's JEneid. 



DANTE 529 

old epic and drama was in this world, and its catastrophe here; 
Dante lays his scene in the human soul, and his fifth act in the 
other world. He makes himself the protagonist of his own 
drama. In the Commedia for the first time Christianity wholly 
revolutionizes Art, and becomes its seminal principle. But 
aesthetically also, as well as morally, Dante stands between the 
old and the new, and reconciles them. The theme of his poem 
is purely subjective, modern, what is called romantic; but its 
treatment is objective (almost to realism, here and there), and 
it is limited by a form of classic severity. In the same way he 
sums up in himself the two schools of modern poetry which had 
preceded him, and, while essentially lyrical in his subject, is 
epic in the handling of it. So also he combines the deeper and 
more abstract religious sentiment of the Teutonic races with 
the scientific precision and absolute systematism of the 
Romanic. In one respect Dante stands alone. While we can 
in some sort account for such representative men as Voltaire 
and Goethe (nay, even Shakespeare) by the intellectual and 
moral fermentation of the age in which they lived, Dante seems 
morally isolated and to have drawn his inspiration almost v 
wholly from his own internal reserves. Of his mastery in style 
we need say little here. Of his mere language, nothing could be 
better than the expression of Rivarol: 1 "His verse holds itself 
erect by the mere force of the substantive and verb, without 
the help of a single epithet." We will only add a word on what 
seems to us an extraordinary misapprehension of Coleridge, 
who disparages Dante by comparing his Lucifer with Milton's 
Satan. He seems to have forgotten that the precise measure- 
ments of Dante were not prosaic, but absolutely demanded by 
the nature of his poem. He is describing an actual journey, and 
his exactness makes a part of the verisimilitude. We read the 
Paradise Lost as a poem, the Commedia as a record of fact; and 
no one can read Dante without believing his story, for it is 
plain that he believed it himself. It is false aesthetics to con- 
found the grandiose with the imaginative. Milton's angels are 
not to be compared with Dante's, at once real and supernatural; 
and the Deity of Milton is a Calvinistic Zeus, while nothing in 

1 "Rivarol, who translated the Inferno in 1783, was the first Frenchman who 
divined the wonderful force and vitality of the Commedia." (Lowell, "Dante," 
pp. 143-44, Riverside Edition.) 



530 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

all poetry approaches the imaginative grandeur of Dante's 
vision of God at the conclusion of the Paradiso. In all literary- 
history there is no such figure as Dante, no such homogeneous- 
ness of life and works, such loyalty to ideas, such sublime 
irrecognition of the unessential; and there is no moral more 
touching than that the contemporary recognition of such a 
nature, so endowed and so faithful to its endowment, should be 
summed up in the sentence of Florence: Igne comburatur sic 
quod moriatur. 1 

The range of Dante's influence is not less remarkable than 
its intensity. Minds, the antipodes of each other in temper and 
endowment, alike feel the force of his attraction, the pervasive 
comfort of his light and warmth. Boccaccio and Lamennais 
are touched with the same reverential enthusiasm. The imag- 
inative Ruskin is rapt by him, as we have seen, perhaps beyond 
the limit where critical appreciation merges in enthusiasm; 2 
and the matter-of-fact Schlosser tells us that "he, who was 
wont to contemplate earthly life wholly in an earthly light, 
has made use of Dante, Landino, and Vellutello in his solitude 
to bring a heavenly light into his inward life." Almost all other 
poets have their seasons, but Dante penetrates to the moral 
core of those who once fairly come within his sphere, and pos- 
sesses them wholly. His readers turn students, his students 
zealots, and what was a taste becomes a religion. The homeless 
exile finds a home in thousands of grateful hearts: E da esilio 
venne a questa pace. 3 

Every kind of objection, aesthetic and other, may be, and 
has been, made to the Divina Commedia, especially by critics 

1 "Let him be burned with fire so that he die." 

In order to fix more precisely in the mind the place of Dante in relation to 
the history of thought, literature, and events, we subjoin a few dates: Dante 
born, 1265; end of Crusades, death of St. Louis, 1270; Aquinas died, 1274; 
Bonaventura died, 1274; Giotto born, 1276; Albertus Magnus died, 1280; Sicilian 
vespers, 1282; death of Ugolino and Francesca da Rimini, 1282; death of Bea- 
trice, 1290; Roger Bacon died, 1292; death of Cimabue, 1302; Dante's banish- 
ment, 1302; Petrarch born, 1304; Fra Dolcino burned, 1307; Pope Clement V 
at Avignon, 1309; Templars suppressed, 1312; Boccaccio born, 1313; Dante died, 
1321; Wycliffe born, 1324; Chaucer born, 1328. [Author's note.] 

2 "Perhaps no other man could have called forth such an expression as that of 
Ruskin, that 'the central man of all the world, as representing in perfect balance 
the imaginative, moral, and intellectual faculties, all at their highest, is Dante.' " 
(Lowell, "Dante," pp. 147-48, Riverside Edition.) 

3 " Out of exile he came into this peace." 



DANTE 531' 

who have but a superficial acquaintance with it, or rather with 
the Inferno, which is as far as most English critics go. Cole- 
ridge himself, who had a way of divining what was in books, 
may be justly suspected of not going further, though with 
Cary to help him. Mr. Carlyle, who has said admirable things 
of Dante the man, was very imperfectly read in Dante the 
author, or he would never have put Sordello in hell and the 
meeting with Beatrice in paradise. In France it was not much 
better (though Rivarol has said the best thing hitherto of 
Dante's parsimony of epithet 1 ) before Ozanam, who, if with 
decided ultramontane leanings, has written excellently well of 
our poet, and after careful study. Voltaire, though not without 
relentings toward a poet who had put popes heels upward in 
hell, regards him on the whole as a stupid monster and bar- 
barian. It was no better in Italy, if we may trust Foscolo, who 
affirms that "neither Pelli nor others deservedly more cele- 
brated than he ever read attentively the poem of Dante, per- 
haps never ran through it from the first verse to the last." 2 
Accordingly we have heard that the Commedia was a sermon, 
a political pamphlet, the revengeful satire of a disappointed 
Ghibelline, nay, worse, of a turncoat Guelph. It is narrow, it is 
bigoted, it is savage, it is theological, it is mediaeval, it is 
heretical, it is scholastic, it is obscure, it is pedantic, its Italian 
is not that of la Crusca* its ideas are not those of an enlightened 
eighteenth century, it is everything, in short, that a poem 
should not be; and yet, singularly enough, the circle of its 
charm has widened in proportion as men have receded from 
the theories of Church and State which are supposed to be its 
foundation, and as the modes of thought of its author have 
become more alien to those of his readers. In spite of all 
objections, some of which are well founded, the Commedia 
remains one of the three or four universal books that have ever 
been written. 

1 Rivarol characterized only a single quality of Dante's style, who knew how 
to spend as well as spare. Even the Inferno, on which he based his remark, might 
have put him on his guard. Dante understood very well the use of ornament in 
its fitting place. Est enim exornatio alicujus convenientis additio, he tells us in his 
De Vulgari Eloquio (lib. ii. cap. i.). His simile of the doves (Inferno, v, 82 et seq.), 
perhaps the most exquisite in all poetry, quite oversteps Rivarol's narrow limit 
of "substantive and verb." [Author's note.] 

2 Discorso sul testo, ec, § xvm. [Author's note.] 

3 A Florentine academy similar to the French Academy. 



532 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL " 

We may admit, with proper limitations, the modern dis- 
tinction between the Artist and the Moralist. With the one 
Form is all in all, with the other Tendency. The aim of the one 
is to delight, of the other to convince. The one is master of his 
purpose, the other mastered by it. The whole range of percep- 
tion and thought is valuable to the one as it will minister to 
imagination, to the other only as it is available for argument. 
With the moralist use is beauty, good only as it serves an 
ulterior purpose ; with the artist beauty is use, good in and for 
itself. In the fine arts the vehicle makes part of the thought, 
coalesces with it. The living conception shapes itself a body 
in marble, color, or modulated sound, and henceforth the. two 
are inseparable. The results of the moralist pass into the intel- 
lectual atmosphere of mankind, it matters little by what mode 
of conveyance. But where, as in Dante, the religious sentiment 
and the imagination are both organic, something interfused 
with the whole being of the man, so that they work in kindly 
sympathy, the moral will insensibly suffuse itself with beauty 
as a cloud with light. Then that fine sense of remote analogies, 
awake to the assonance between facts seemingly remote and 
unrelated, between the outward and inward worlds, though 
convinced that the things of this life are shadows, will be per- 
suaded also that they are not fantastic merely, but imply a 
substance somewhere, and will love to set forth the beauty of 
the visible image because it suggests the ineffably higher 
charm of the unseen original. Dante's ideal of life, the enlight- 
ening and strengthening of that native instinct of the soul 
which leads it to strive backward toward its divine source, 
may sublimate the senses till each becomes a window for the 
light of truth and the splendor of God to shine through. In 
him as in Calderon the perpetual presence of imagination not 
only glorifies the philosophy of life and the science of theology, 
but idealizes both in symbols of material beauty. Though 
Dante's conception of the highest end of man was that he 
should climb through every phase of human experience to that 
transcendental and supersensual region where the true, the 
good, and the beautiful blend in the white light of God, yet 
the prism of his imagination forever resolved the ray into color 
again, and he loved to show it also where, entangled and 
obstructed in matter, it became beautiful once more to the eye 



DANTE 533 

of sense. Speculation, he tells us, is the use, without any mix- 
ture, of our noblest part (the reason). And this part cannot in 
this life have its perfect use, which is to behold God (who is 
the highest object of the intellect), except inasmuch as the 
intellect considers and beholds him in his effects. 1 Underlying 
Dante the metaphysician, statesman, and theologian, was 
always Dante the poet, 2 irradiating and vivifying, gleaming 
through in a picturesque phrase, or touching things unexpect- 
edly with that ideal light which softens and subdues like dis- 
tance in the landscape. The stern outline of his system wavers 
and melts away before the eye of the reader in a mirage of im- 
agination that lifts from beyond the sphere of vision and hangs 
in serener air images of infinite suggestion projected from 
worlds not realized, but substantial to faith, hope, and aspira- 
tion. Beyond the horizon of speculation floats, in the passion- 
less splendor of the empyrean, the city of our God, the Rome 
whereof Christ is a Roman, 3 the citadel of refuge, even in this 
life, for souls purified by sorrow and self-denial, transhuman- 
ized 4 to the divine abstraction of pure contemplation. "And 
it is called Empyrean," he says in his letter to Can Grande, 
"which is the same as a heaven blazing with fire or ardor, not 
because there is in it a material fire or burning, but a spiritual 
one, which is blessed love or charity." But this splendor he 
bodies forth, if sometimes quaintly, yet always vividly and 
most often in types of winning grace. 

Dante was a mystic with a very practical turn of mind. A 
Platonist by nature, an Aristotelian by training, his feet keep 
closely to the narrow path of dialectics, because he believed it 
the safest, while his eyes are fixed on the stars and his brain is 
busy with things not demonstrable, save by that grace of God 

1 Convito, Tr. rv, c. xxn. [Author's note.] 

2 It is remarkable that when Dante, in 1297, as a preliminary condition to 
active politics, enrolled himself in the guild of physicians and apothecaries, he is 
qualified only with the title poeta. The arms of the Alighieri (curiously suitable 
to him who sovra gli altri come aquila void) were a wing of gold in a field of azure. 
His vivid sense of beauty even hovers sometimes like a corposant over the some- 
what stiff lines of his Latin prose. For example, in his letter to the kings and 
princes of Italy on the coming of Henry VII: "A new day brightens, revealing 
the dawn which already scatters the shades of long calamity; already the breezes 
of morning gather; the lips of heaven are reddening!" [Author's note.] 

3 Purgatorio, xxxn, 100. [Author's note.] 

4 Paradiso, 1, 70. [Author's note.] 



534 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

which passeth all understanding, nor capable of being told 
unless by far-off hints and adumbrations. Though he himself 
has directly explained the scope, the method, and the larger 
meaning of his greatest work, 1 though he has indirectly pointed 
out the way to its interpretation in the Convito, and though 
everything he wrote is but an explanatory comment on his 
own character and opinions, unmistakably clear and precise, 
yet both man and poem continue not only to be misunderstood 
popularly, but also by such as should know better. 2 That 
those who confined their studies to the Commedia should have 
interpreted it variously is not wonderful, for out of the first or 
literal meaning others open, one out of another, each of wider 
circuit and purer abstraction, like Dante's own heavens, giving 
and receiving light. 3 Indeed, Dante himself is partly to blame 
for this. "The form or mode of treatment," he says, "is poetic, 
fictive, descriptive, digressive, trahsumptive, and withal defini- 
tive, divisive, probative, improbative, and positive of exam- 
ples." Here are conundrums enough, to be sure! To Italians 
at home, for whom the great arenas of political and religious 
speculation were closed, the temptation to find a subtler mean- 
ing than the real one was irresistible. Italians in exile, on the 
other hand, made Dante the stalking-horse from behind which 
they could take a long shot at Church and State, or at obscurer 
foes. 4 Infinitely touching and sacred to us is the instinct of 
intense sympathy which draws these latter toward their great 
forerunner, exul immeritus 5 like themselves. 6 But they have 

1 In a letter to Can Grande (xi of the Epistolce). [Author's note.] 

2 Witte, Wegele, and Ruth in German, and Ozanam in French, have rendered 
ignorance of Dante inexcusable among men of culture. [Author's note.] 

3 Inferno, vn, 75. "Nay, his style," says Miss Rossetti, "is more than concise: 
it is elliptical, it is recondite. A first thought often lies coiled up and hidden 
under a second; the words which state the conclusion involve the premises and 
develop the subject" (p. 3). [Author's note; the reference is to The Shadow of 
Dante, by Maria Francesca Rossetti.] 

4 A complete vocabulary of Italian billingsgate might be selected from 
Biagioli. Or see the concluding pages of Nannucci's excellent tract, Intorno alle 
voci usate da Dante, Corfu, 1840. Even Foscolo could not always refrain. Dante 
should have taught them to shun such vulgarities. See Inferno, xxx, 131-48. 
[Author's note.] 

5 "One unjustly exiled." 

6 "My Italy, my sweetest Italy, for having loved thee too much I have lost 
thee,, and, perhaps, ... ah, may God avert the omen! But more proud than sor- 
rowful for an evil endured for thee alone, I continue to consecrate my vigils to 
thee alone. ... An exile full of anguish, perchance, availed to sublime the more 



DANTE 535 

too often wrung a meaning from Dante which is injurious to 
the man and out of keeping with the ideas of his age. The aim 
in expounding a great poem should be, not to discover an end- 
less variety of meanings often contradictory, but whatever it 
has of great and perennial significance; for such it must have, 
or it would long ago have ceased to be living and operative, 
would long ago have taken refuge in the Chartreuse of great 
libraries, dumb thenceforth to all mankind. We do not mean 
to say that this minute exegesis is useless or unpraiseworthy, 
but only that it should be subsidiary to the larger way. It 
serves to bring out more clearly what is very wonderful in 
Dante, namely, the omnipresence of his memory throughout 
the work, so that its intimate coherence does not exist in spite 
of the reconditeness and complexity of allusion, but is woven 
out of them. The poem has many senses, he tells us, and there 
can be no doubt of it; but it has also, and this alone will account 
for its fascination, a living soul behind them all and informing 
all, an intense singleness of purpose, a core of doctrine simple, 
human, and wholesome, though it be also, to use his own 
phrase, the bread of angels. 

Nor is this unity characteristic only of the Divina Commedia. 
All the works of Dante, with the possible exception of the 
De Vulgari Eloquio (which is unfinished), are component parts 
of a Whole Duty of Man mutually completing and interpret- 
ing one another. They are also, as truly as Wordsworth's 
Prelude, a history of the growth of a poet's mind. Like the 
English poet he valued himself at a high rate, the higher no 
doubt after Fortune had made him outwardly cheap. Sempre 
il magnanimo si magnified in sue- cuore; e cost lo pusillanimo per 
contrario sempre si tiene meno che non e. 1 As in the prose of 
Milton, whose striking likeness to Dante in certain prominent 
features of character has been remarked by Foscolo, there are 

in thy Alighieri that lofty soul which was a beautiful gift of thy smiling sky; 
and an exile equally wearisome and undeserved now avails, perhaps, to sharpen 
my small genius so that it may penetrate into what he left written for thy 
instruction and for his glory." (Rossetti, Disamina, ec, p. 405.) Rossetti is 
himself a proof that a noble mind need not be narrowed by misfortune. His 
Comment (unhappily incomplete) is one of the most valuable and suggestive. 
[Author's note.] 

1 The great-minded man ever magnifies himself in his heart, and in like man- 
ner the pusillanimous holds himself less than he is. (Convito, Tr. 1, c. 11.) 
[Author's note.] 



536 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

in Dante's minor works continual allusions to himself of great 
value as material for his biographer. Those who read atten- 
tively will discover that the tenderness he shows toward Fran- 
cesca and her lover 1 did not spring from any friendship for her 
family, but was a constant quality of his nature, and that what 
is called his revengeful ferocity is truly the implacable resent- 
ment of a lofty mind and a lover of good against evil, whether 
showing itself in private or public life; perhaps hating the 
former manifestation of it the most because he believed it to 
be the root of the latter, — a faith which those who have 
watched the course of politics in a democracy, as he had, will 
be inclined to share. His gentleness is all the more striking by 
contrast, like that silken compensation which blooms out of 
the thorny stem of the cactus. His moroseness, 2 his party 
spirit, and his personal vindictiveness are all predicated upon 
the Inferno, and upon a misapprehension or careless reading 
even of that. Dante's zeal was not of that sentimental kind, 
quickly kindled and as soon quenched, that hovers on the sur- 
face of shallow minds, 

"Even as the flame of unctuous things is wont 
To move upon the outer surface only"; 3 

it was the steady heat of an inward fire kindling the whole 
character of the man through and through, like the minarets 
of his own city of Dis. 4 He was, as seems distinctive in some 
degree of the Latinized races, an unflinching a priori logician, 
not unwilling to "syllogize invidious verities," 5 wherever they 
might lead him, like Sigier, whom he has put in paradise, 
though more than suspected of heterodoxy. But at the same 
time, as we shall see, he had something of the practical good 
sense of that Teutonic stock whence he drew a part of his blood, 
which prefers a malleable syllogism that can yield without 

1 Inferno, v, 73-141. 

2 Dante's notion of virtue was not that of an ascetic, nor has any one ever 
painted her in colors more soft and splendid than he in the Convito. She is 
"sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes," and he dwells on the delights of her love 
with a rapture which kindles and purifies. So far from making her an inquisitor, 
he says expressly that she "should be gladsome and not sullen in all her works." 
{Convito, Tr. I, c. 8.) "Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose"! [Author's 
note.] 

3 Inferno, xix, 28, 29. [Author's note.] 

4 Inferno, viii, 70-75. [Author's note.] 
[ s Paradiso, x, 138. [Author's note.] 



DANTE 537 

breaking to the inevitable, but incalculable pressure of human 
nature and the stiff er logic of events. His theory of Church 
and State was not merely a fantastic one, but intended for the 
use and benefit of men as they were; and he allowed accordingly 
for aberrations, to which even the law of gravitation is forced 
to give place; how much more, then, any scheme whose very 
starting-point is the freedom of the will ! 

The relation of Dante to literature is monumental, and 
marks the era at which the modern begins. He is not only the 
first great poet, but the first great prose writer who used a lan- 
guage not yet subdued to literature, who used it moreover for 
scientific and metaphysical discussion, thus giving an incalcu- 
lable impulse to the culture of his countrymen by making the 
laity free of what had hitherto been the exclusive guild of 
clerks. 1 Whatever poetry had preceded him, whether in the 
Romance or Teutonic tongues, is interesting mainly for its 
simplicity without forethought, or, as in the Nibelungen, for a 
kind of savage grandeur that rouses the sympathy of whatever 
of the natural man is dormant in us. But it shows no trace of 
the creative faculty either in unity of purpose or style, the 
proper characteristics of literature. If it have the charm of 
wanting artifice, it has not the higher charm of art. We are in 
the realm of chaos and chance, nebular, with phosphorescent 
gleams here and there, star-stuff, but uncondensed in stars. 
The Nibelungen is not without far-reaching hints and forebod- 
ings of something finer than we find in it, but they are a 
glamour from the vague darkness which encircles it, like the 
whisper of the sea upon an unknown shore at night, powerful 
only over the more vulgar side of the imagination, and leaving 
no thought, scarce even any image (at least of beauty) behind 
them. Such poems are the amours, not the lasting friendships 
and possessions of the mind. They thrill and cannot satisfy. 

But Dante is not merely the founder of modern literature. 

1 See Wegele, iibi supra, p. 174 et seq. The best analysis of Dante's opinions 
we have ever met with is Emil Ruth's Studien ilber Dante Alighicri, Tubingen, 
1853. Unhappily it wants an index, and accordingly loses a great part of its 
usefulness for those not already familiar with the subject. Nor are its references 
sufficiently exact. We always respect Dr. Ruth's opinions, if we do not wholly 
accept them, for they are all the results of original and assiduous study. [Author's 
note.] 



538 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

He would have been that if he had never written anything 
more than his Canzoni, which for elegance, variety of rhythm, 
and fervor of sentiment were something altogether new. They 
are of a higher mood than any other poems of the same style 
in their own language, or indeed in any other. In beauty of 
phrase and subtlety of analogy they remind one of some of the 
Greek tragic choruses. We are constantly moved in them by a 
nobleness of tone, whose absence in many admired lyrics of the 
kind is poorly supplied by conceits. So perfect is Dante's 
mastery of his material, that in compositions, as he himself 
has shown, so artificial, 1 the form seems rather organic than 
mechanical, which cannot be said of the best of the Provencal 
poets who led the way in this kind. Dante's sonnets also have 
a grace and tenderness which have been seldom matched. His 
lyrical excellence would have got him into the Collections, and 
he would have made here and there an enthusiast as Donne 
does in English, but his great claim to remembrance is not 
merely Italian. It is that he was the first Christian poet, in 
any proper sense of the word, the first who so subdued dogma 
to the uses of plastic imagination as to make something that is 
still poetry of the highest order after it has suffered the disen- 
chantment inevitable in the most perfect translation. Verses 
of the kind usually called sacred (reminding one of the adjec- 
tive's double meaning) had been written before his time in 
the vulgar tongue, such verses as remain inviolably sacred in the 
volumes of specimens, looked at with distant reverence by the 
pious, and with far other feelings by the profane reader. There 
were cycles of poems in which the physical conflict between 
Christianity and Paganism 2 furnished the subject, but in 
which the theological views of the authors, whether doctrinal 
or historical, could hardly be reconciled with any system of 
religion ancient or modern. There were Church legends of 

1 See the second book of the De Vulgari Eloquio. The only other Italian poet 
who reminds us of Dante in sustained dignity is Guido Guinicelli. Dante es- 
teemed him highly, calls him maximus in the De Vulgari Eloquio, and " the father 
of me and of my betters," in the xxvi Purgatorio. See some excellent specimens 
of him in Mr. D. G. Rossetti's remarkable volume of translations from the early 
Italian poets. Mr. Rossetti would do a real and lasting service to literature by 
employing his singular gift in putting Dante's minor poems into English. 
[Author's note.] 

2 The old French poems confound all unbelievers together as pagans and 
worshippers of idols. [Author's note.] 



DANTE 539 

saints and martyrs versified, fit certainly to make any other 
form of martyrdom seem amiable to those who heard them, 
and to suggest palliative thoughts about Diocletian. Finally, 
there were the romances of Arthur and his knights, which later, 
by means of allegory, contrived to be both entertaining and 
edifying; every one who listened to them paying the minstrel 
his money, and having his choice whether he would take them 
as song or sermon. In the heroes of some of these certain 
Christian virtues were typified, and around a few of them, as 
the Holy Grail, a perfume yet lingers of cloistered piety and 
withdrawal. Wolfram von Eschenbach, indeed, has divided his 
Parzival into three books, of Simplicity, Doubt, and Healing, 
which has led Gervinus to trace a not altogether fanciful 
analogy between that poem and the Divina Commedia. The 
doughty old poet, who says of himself, — 

"Of song I have some slight control, 
But deem her of a feeble soul 
That doth not love my naked sword 
Above my sweetest lyric word," 

tells us that his subject is the choice between good and evil; 

"Whose soul takes Untruth for its bride 
And sets himself on Evil's side, 
Chooses the Black, and sure it is 
His path leads down to the abyss; 
But he who doth his nature feed 
With steadfastness and loyal deed 
Lies open to the heavenly light 
And takes his portion with the White." 

But Wolfram's poem has no system, and shows good feeling 
rather than settled conviction. Above all it is wandering (as he 
himself confesses), and altogether wants any controlling pur-, 
pose. But to whatever extent Christianity had insinuated 
itself into and colored European literature, it was mainly as 
mythology. The Christian idea had never yet incorporated 
itself. It was to make its avatar in Dante. To understand fully 
what he accomplished we must form some conception of what 
is meant by the Christian idea. To bring it into fuller relief, 
let us contrast it with the Greek idea as it appears in poetry; 
for we are not dealing with a question of theology so much as 
with one of aesthetics. 



540 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

Greek art at its highest point is doubtless the most perfect 
that we know. But its circle of motives was essentially limited ; 
and the Greek drama in its passion, its pathos, and its humor 
is primarily Greek, and secondarily human. Its tragedy 
chooses its actors from certain heroic families, and finds its 
springs of pity and terror in physical suffering and worldly 
misfortune. Its best examples, like the Antigone, illustrate a 
single duty, or, like the Hippolytus, a single passion, on which, 
as on a pivot, the chief character, statuesquely simple in its 
details, revolves as pieces of sculpture are sometimes made to 
do, displaying its different sides in one invariable light. The 
general impression left on the mind (and this is apt to be a 
truer one than any drawn from single examples) is that the 
duty is one which is owed to custom, that the passion leads to 
a breach of some convention settled by common consent, 1 and 
accordingly it is an outraged society whose figure looms in the 
background, rather than an offended God. At most it was one 
god of many, and meanwhile another might be friendly. In 
the Greek epic, the gods are partisans, they hold caucuses, they 
lobby and log-roll for their candidates. The tacit admission 
of a revealed code of morals wrought a great change. The com- 
plexity and range of passion is vastly increased when the offence 
is at once both crime and sin, a wrong done against order and 
asrainst conscience at the same time. The relation of the Greek 
tragedy to the higher powers is chiefly antagonistic, struggle 
against an implacable destiny, sublime struggle, and of heroes, 
but sure of defeat at last. And that defeat is final. Grand 
figures are those it exhibits to us, in some respects Unequalled, 
and in their severe simplicity they compare with modern 
poetry as sculpture with painting. Considered merely as works 
of art, these products of the Greek imagination satisfy our 
highest conception of form. They suggest inevitably a feeling 
of perfect completeness, isolation, and independence, of some- 
thing rounded and finished in itself. The secret of those old 
shapers died with them; their wand is broken, their book sunk 
deeper than ever plummet sounded. The type of their work is 
the Greek temple, which leaves nothing to hope for in unity 

1 Dante is an ancient in this respect as in many others, but the difference is 
that with him society is something divinely ordained. He follows Aristotle pretty' 
closely, but on his own theory crime and sin are identical. [Author's noteJ . . 



DANTE ] 541 

and perfection of design, in harmony and subordination of 
parts, and in entireness of impression. But in this aesthetic 
completeness it ends. It rests solidly and complacently on the 
earth, and the mind rests there with it. 

Now the Christian idea has to do with the human soul, 
which Christianity may be almost said to have invented. While 
all Paganism represents a few preeminent families, the founders 
of dynasties or ancestors of races, as of kin with the gods, 
Christianity makes every pedigree end in Deity, makes mon- 
arch and slave the children of one God. Its heroes struggle not 
against, but upward and onward toward, the higher powers who 
are always on their side. Its highest conception of beauty is 
not aesthetic, but moral. With it prosperity and adversity 
have exchanged meanings. It finds enemies in those worldly 
good-fortunes where Pagan and even Hebrew literature saw 
the highest blessing, and invincible allies in sorrow, poverty, 
humbleness of station, where the former world recognized only 
implacable foes. While it utterly abolished all boundary lines 
of race or country and made mankind unitary, its hero is 
always the individual man whoever and wherever he may be. 
Above all, an entirely new conception of the Infinite and of 
man's relation to it came in with Christianity. That, and not 
the finite, is always the background, consciously or not. It 
changed the scene of the last act of every drama to the next 
world. Endless aspiration of all the faculties became thus the 
ideal of Christian life, and to express it more or less perfectly 
the ideal of essentially Christian art. It was this which the 
Middle Ages instinctively typified in the Gothic cathedral, — 
no accidental growth, but the visible symbol of an inward 
faith, — which soars forever upward, and yearns toward 
heaven like a martyr-flame suddenly turned to stone. 

It is not without significance that Goethe, who, like Dante, 
also absorbed and represented the tendency and spirit of his 
age, should, during his youth and while Europe was alive with 
the moral and intellectual longing which preluded the French 
Revolution, have loved the Gothic architecture. It is no less 
significant that in the period of reaction toward more positive 
thought which followed, he should have preferred the Greek. 
His greatest poem, conceived during the former era, is Gothic. 
Dante, endeavoring to conform himself to literary tradition, 



542 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

began to write the Divina Commedia in Latin, and had elabo- 
rated several cantos of it in that dead and intractable material. 
But that poetic instinct, which is never the instinct of an indi- 
vidual, but of his age, could not so be satisfied, and leaving the 
classic structure he had begun to stand as a monument of 
failure, he completed his work in Italian. Instead of endeavor- 
ing to manufacture a great poem out of what was foreign and 
artificial, he let the poem make itself out of him. The epic 
which he wished to write in the universal language of scholars, 
and which might have had its ten lines in the history of litera- 
ture, would sing itself in provincial Tuscan, and turns out to be 
written in the universal dialect of mankind. Thus all great 
poets have been in a certain sense provincial, — Homer, 
Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Burns, Scott in the Heart of 
Midlothian and Bride of Lammermoor, — because the office of 
the poet is always vicarious, because nothing that has not been 
living experience can become living expression, because the 
collective thought, the faith, the desire of a nation or a race, 
is the cumulative result of many ages, is something organic, 
and is wiser and stronger than any single person, and will make 
a great statesman or a great poet out of any man who can 
entirely surrender himself to it. 

As the Gothic cathedral, then, is the type of the Christian 
idea, so is it also of Dante's poem. And as that in its artistic 
unity is but the completed thought of a single architect, which 
yet could never have been realized except out of the faith and 
by the contributions of an entire people, whose beliefs and 
superstitions, whose imagination and fancy, find expression in 
its statues and its carvings, its calm saints and martyrs now at 
rest forever in the seclusion of their canopied niches, and its 
wanton grotesques thrusting themselves forth from every 
pinnacle and gargoyle, so in Dante's poem, while it is as per- 
sonal and peculiar as if it were his private journal and auto- 
biography, we can yet read the diary and the autobiography 
of the thirteenth century and of the Italian people. Complete 
and harmonious in design as his work is, it is yet no Pagan 
temple enshrining a type of the human made divine by triumph 
of corporeal beauty; it is not a private chapel housing a single 
saint and dedicate to one chosen bloom of Christian piety or 
devotion; it is truly a cathedral, over whose high altar hangs 



DANTE 



543 



the emblem of suffering, of the Divine made human to teach 
the beauty of adversity, the eternal presence of the spiritual, 
not overhanging and threatening, but informing and sustain- 
ing the material. In this cathedral of Dante's there are side- 
chapels as is fit, with altars to all Christian virtues and perfec- 
tions; but the great impression of its leading thought is that of 
aspiration, forever and ever. In the three divisions of the 
poem we may trace something more than a fancied analogy 
with a Christian basilica. There is first the ethnic forecourt, 
then the purgatorial middle space, and last the holy of holies 
dedicated to the eternal presence of the mediatorial God. 1 

Perhaps it seems little to say that Dante was the first great 
poet who ever made a poem wholly out of himself, but, rightly 
looked at, it implies a wonderful self-reliance and originality 
in his genius. His is the first keel that ever ventured into the 
silent sea of human consciousness to find a new world of poetry. 
"L' acqua ch' io prendo giammai non si corse." 2 

He discovered that not only the story of some heroic person, 
but that of any man might be epical; that the way to heaven 
was not outside the world, but through it. Living at a time 
when the end of the world was still looked for as imminent, 3 
he believed that the second coming of the Lord was to take 
place on no more conspicuous stage than the soul of man ; that 
his kingdom would be established in the surrendered will. A 
poem, the precious distillation of such a character and such a 
life as his through all those sorrowing but undespondent years, 
must have a meaning in it which few men have meaning enough 
in themselves wholly to penetrate. That its allegorical form 
belongs to a past fashion, with which the modern mind has 
little sympathy, we should no more think of denying than of 

1 "The poem consists of three parts, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. ... In 
the form of the verse (triple rhyme) we may find an emblem of the Trinity, and 
in the three divisions, of the threefold state of man, sin, grace, and beatitude. 
Symbolic meanings reveal themselves, or make themselves suspected, every- 
where, as in the architecture of the Middle Ages." (Lowell, "Dante," p. 158.) 

2 ["The water which I take was never coursed before."] Paradiso, 11, 7. 
Lucretius makes the same boast: — 

"Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante 
Trita solo." 
[Author's note.] 
1 Convito, Tr. 11, c. 15. [Author's note.] 



544 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

whitewashing a fresco of Giotto. But we may take it as we 
may nature, which is also full of double meanings, either as 
picture or as parable, either for the simple delight of its beauty 
or as a shadow of the spiritual world. We may take it as we 
may history, either for its picturesqueness or its moral, either 
for the variety of its figures, or as a witness to that perpetual 
presence of God in his creation of which Dante was so pro- 
foundly sensible. He had seen and suffered much, but it is 
only to the man who is himself of value that experience is valu- 
able. He had not looked on man and nature as most of us do, 
with less interest than into the columns of our daily newspaper. 
He saw in them the latest authentic news of the God who made 
them, for he carried everywhere that vision washed clear with 
tears which detects the meaning under the mask, and, beneath 
the casual and transitory, the eternal keeping its sleepless 
watch. The secret of Dante's power is not far to seek. Who- 
ever can express himself with the full force of unconscious 
sincerity will be found to have uttered something ideal and 
universal. Dante intended a didactic poem, but the most pic- 
turesque of poets could not escape his genius, and his sermon 
sings and glows and charms in a manner that surprises more 
at the fiftieth reading than the first, such variety of freshness 
is in imagination. 

There are no doubt in the Divina Commedia (regarded merely 
as poetry) sandy spaces enough both of physics and meta- 
physics, but with every deduction Dante remains the first of 
descriptive as well as moral poets. His verse is as various as 
the feeling it conveys;' now it has the terseness and edge of 
steel, and now palpitates with iridescent softness like the 
breast of a dove. In vividness he is without a rival. He drags 
back by its tangled locks the unwilling head of some petty 
traitor of an Italian provincial town, lets the fire glare on the 
sullen face for a moment, and it sears itself into the memory 
forever. He shows us an angel glowing with that love of God 
which makes him a star even amid the glory of heaven, and 
the holy shape keeps lifelong watch in our fantasy, constant 
as a sentinel. He has the skill of conveying impressions indi- 
rectly. In the gloom of hell his bodily presence is revealed by 
his stirring something, on the mount of expiation by casting a 
shadow. Would he have us feel the brightness of an angel? 



DANTE 545 

He makes him whiten afar through the smoke like a dawn, 1 or, 
walking straight toward the setting sun, he finds his eyes sud- 
denly unable to withstand a greater splendor against which his 
hand is unavailing to shield him. Even its reflected light, then, 
is brighter than the direct ray of the sun. 2 And how much more 
keenly do we feel the parched lips of Master Adam for those 
rivulets of the Casentino which run down into the Arno, "mak- 
ing their channels cool and soft"! His comparisons are as 
fresh, as simple, and as directly from nature as those of 
Homer. 3 Sometimes they show a more subtle observation, 
as where he compares the stooping of Antaeus over him to the 
leaning tower of Carisenda, to which the clouds, flying in an 
opposite direction to its inclination, give away their motion. 4 
His suggestions of individuality, too, from attitude or speech, 
as in Farinata, Sordello, or Pia, 5 give in a hint what is worth 
acres of so-called character-painting. In straightforward pa- 
thos, the single and sufficient thrust of phrase, he has no 
competitor. He is too sternly touched to be effusive and 
tearful : 

"Io non piangeva, si dentro impietrai." 6 
His is always the true coin of speech, 

"Si lucida e si tonda 
Che nel suo conio nulla ci s' inforsa," 7 

and never the highly ornamental promise to pay, token of 
insolvency. 

1 Purgatorio, xvi, 142. Here is Milton's "Far off his coming shone." [Author's 
note.] 

2 Purgatorio, xv, 7, et seq. [Author's note.] 

3 See, for example, Inferno, xvn, 127-32; ib., xxiv, 7-12; Purgatorio, n, 124- 
29; ib., in, 79-84; ib., xxvn, 76-81; Paradiso, xix, 91-93; ib., xxi, 34-39; ib., 
xxiii, 1-9. [Author's note.] 

4 Inferno, xxxi, 136-38. 

"And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, 
That give away their motion to the stars." 

(Coleridge, " Dejection, an Ode.") 
See also the comparison of the dimness of the faces seen around him in Paradise 
to "a pearl on a white forehead." (Paradiso, 111, 14.) [Author's note.] 

5 Inferno, x, 35-41; Purgatorio, vi, 61-66; ib., x, 133. [Author's note.] 

6 ["I did not weep : so strong grew I within" (Inferno, xxxni, 49).] For 
example, Cavalcanti's Come dicesti egli ebbe? (Inferno, x, 67, 68.) Ansel- 
muccio's Tu guardi si, padre, che hail (Inferno, xxxni, 51.) [Author's note.] 

7 " So bright and round that there is nothing dubious in its coining." (Para- 
diso, xxiv, 86-87.) 



546 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

No doubt it is primarily by his poetic qualities that a poet 
must be judged, for it is by these, if by anything, that he is to 
maintain his place in literature. And he must be judged by 
them absolutely, with reference, that is, to the highest stand- 
ard, and not relatively to the fashions and opportunities of the 
age in which he lived. Yet these considerations must fairly 
enter into our decision of another side of the question, and one 
that has much to do with the true quality of the man, with his 
character as distinguished from his talent, and therefore with 
how much he will influence men as well as delight them. We 
may reckon up pretty exactly a man's advantages and defects 
as an artist; these he has in common with others, and they are 
to be measured by a recognized standard ; but there is some- 
thing in his genius that is incalculable. It would be hard to 
define the causes of the difference of impression made upon us 
respectively by two such men as ^Eschylus and Euripides, but 
we feel profoundly that the latter, though in some respects a 
better dramatist, was an infinitely lighter weight. vEschylus 
stirs something in us far deeper than the sources of mere pleas- 
urable excitement. The man behind the verse is far greater 
than the verse itself, and the impulse he gives to what is deep- 
est and most sacred in us, though we cannot always explain it, 
is none the less real and lasting. Some men always seem to 
remain outside their work ; others make their individuality felt 
in every part of it; their very life vibrates in every verse, and 
we do not wonder that it has "made them lean for many years." 
The virtue that has gone out of them abides in what they do. 
The book such a man makes is indeed, as Milton called it, "the 
precious lifeblood of a master spirit." Theirs is a true immor- 
tality, for it is their soul, and not their talent, that survives in 
their work. Dante's concise forthrightness of phrase, which to 
that of most other poets is as a stab 1 to a blow with a cudgel, 
the vigor of his thought, the beauty of his images, the refine- 
ment of his conception of spiritual things, are marvellous if we 
compare him with his age and its best achievement. But it is 
for his power of inspiring and sustaining, it is because they find 
in him a spur to noble aims, a secure refuge in that defeat which 
the present always seems, that they prize Dante who know 

1 To the "bestiality" of certain arguments Dante says, "one would wish to 
reply, not with words, but with a knife." (Convito, Tr. rv, c. 14.) [Author's note.] 



DANTE 547 

and love him best. He is not merely a great poet, but an influ- 
ence, part of the soul's resources in time of trouble. From him 
she learns that, "married to the truth, she is a mistress, but 
otherwise a slave shut out of all liberty." 1 

All great poets have their message to deliver us, from some- 
thing higher than they. We venture on no unworthy compari- 
son between him who reveals to us the beauty of this world's 
love and the grandeur of this world's passion and him who 
shows that love of God is the fruit whereof all other loves are 
but the beautiful and fleeting blossom, that the passions are 
yet sublimer objects of contemplation, when, subdued by the 
will, they become patience in suffering and perseverance in the 
upward path. But we cannot help thinking that if Shakespeare 
be the most comprehensive intellect, so Dante is the highest 
spiritual nature that has expressed itself in rhythmical form. 
Had he merely made us feel how petty the ambitions, sorrows, 
and vexations of earth appear when looked down on from the 
heights of our own character and the seclusion of our own 
genius, or from the region where we commune with God, he 
had done much: 

"I with my sight returned through one and all 
The sevenfold spheres, and I beheld this globe 
Such that I smiled at its ignoble semblance." 2 

But he has done far more; he has shown us the way by which 
that country far beyond the stars may be reached, may become 
the habitual dwelling-place and fortress of our nature, instead 
of being the object of its vague aspiration in moments of indo- 
lence. At the Round Table of King Arthur there was left always 
one seat empty for him who should accomplish the adventure 
of the Holy Grail. It was called the perilous seat because of 
the dangers he must encounter who would win it. In the com- 
pany of the epic poets there was a place left for whoever should 
embody the Christian idea of a triumphant life, outwardly all 
defeat, inwardly victorious, who should make us partakers of 
that cup of sorrow in which all are communicants with Christ. 
He who should do this would indeed achieve the perilous seat, 
for he must combine poesy with doctrine in such cunning wise 
that the one lose not its beauty nor the other its severity, — 

1 Convilo, Tr. rv, c. 2. [Author's note.] 

1 Paradiso, xxn, 132-35; ib., xxvn, no. [Author's note.] 



548 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

and Dante has done it. As he takes possession of it we seem to 
hear the cry he himself heard when Virgil rejoined the company 
of great singers, 

"All honor to the loftiest of poets!" 



DEMOCRACY * 

He must be a born leader or misleader of men, or must have 
been sent into the world unfurnished with that modulating 
and restraining balance-wheel which we call a sense of humor, 
who, in old age, has as strong a confidence in his opinions and 
in the necessity of bringing the universe into conformity with 
them as he had in youth. In a world the very condition of 
whose being is that it should be in perpetual flux, where all 
seems mirage, and the one abiding thing is the effort to dis- 
tinguish realities from appearances, the elderly man must be 
indeed of a singularly tough and valid fibre who is certain that 
he has any clarified residuum of experience, any assured verdict 
of reflection, that deserves to be called an opinion, or who, 
even if he had, feels that he is justified in holding mankind by 
the button while he is expounding it. And in a world of daily 
— nay, almost hourly — journalism, where every clever man, 
every man who thinks himself clever, or whom anybody else 
thinks clever, is called upon to deliver his judgment point- 
blank and at the word of command on every conceivable sub- 
ject of human thought, or, on what sometimes seems to him 
very much the same thing, on every inconceivable display of 
human want of thought, there is such a spendthrift waste of all 
those commonplaces which furnish the permitted staple of 
public discourse that there is little chance of beguiling a new 

1 "His discourse on democracy at Birmingham, in October, 1884, was not 
only an event, but an event without a precedent. He was the minister of the 
American republic to the British monarchy, and, as that minister, publicly to 
declare in England the most radical democratic principles as the ultimate logical 
result of the British Constitution, and to do it with a temper, an urbanity, a 
moderation, a precision of statement, and a courteous grace of humor which 
charmed doubt into acquiescence and amazement into unfeigned admiration and 
acknowledgment of a great service to political thought greatly done — this was 
an event unknown in the annals of diplomacy, and this is what Lowell did at 
Birmingham." (George William Curtis, Address in Lowell's honor before the 
Brooklyn Institute.) To-day, however, Lowell's principles would scarcely be 
regarded as " most radical." 



DEMOCRACY 549 

tune out of the one-stringed instrument on which we have been 
thrumming so long. In this desperate necessity one is often 
tempted to think that, if all the words of the dictionary were 
tumbled down in a heap and then all those fortuitous juxtapo- 
sitions and combinations that made tolerable sense were picked 
out and pieced together, we might find among them some 
poignant suggestions towards novelty of thought or expression. 
But, alas ! it is only the great poets who seem to have this un- 
solicited profusion of unexpected and incalculable phrase, this 
infinite variety of topic. For everybody else everything has 
been said before, and said over again after. He who has read 
his Aristotle will be apt to think that observation has on most 
points of general applicability said its last word, and he who 
has mounted the tower of Plato to look abroad from it will 
never hope to climb another with so lofty a vantage of specu- 
lation. Where it is so simple if not so easy a thing to hold one's 
peace, why add to the general confusion of tongues? There is 
something disheartening, too, in being expected to fill up not 
less than a certain measure of time, as if the mind were an 
hour-glass, that need only be shaken and set on one end or the 
other, as the case may be, to run its allotted sixty minutes with 
decorous exactitude. I recollect being once told by the late 
eminent naturalist, Agassiz, that when he was to deliver his 
first lecture as professor (at Zurich, I believe) he had grave 
doubts of his ability to occupy the prescribed three quarters 
of an hour. He was speaking without notes, and glancing 
anxiously from time to time at the watch that lay before him 
on the desk. "When I had spoken a half hour," he said, "I 
had told them everything I knew in the world, everything! 
Then I began to repeat myself," he added, roguishly, "and I 
have done nothing else ever since." Beneath the humorous 
exaggeration of the story I seemed to see the face of a very 
serious and improving moral. And yet if one were to say only 
what he had to say and then stopped, his audience would feel 
defrauded of their honest measure. Let us take courage by the 
example of the French, whose exportation of Bordeaux wines 
increases as the area of their land in vineyards is diminished. 
To me, somewhat hopelessly revolving these things, the un- 
delayable year has rolled round, and I find myself called upon 
to say something in this place, where so many wiser men have 



5So JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

spoken before me. Precluded, in my quality of national guest, 
by motives of taste and discretion, from dealing with any 
question of immediate and domestic concern, it seemed to me 
wisest, or at any rate most prudent, to choose a topic of com- 
paratively abstract interest, and to ask your indulgence for a 
few somewhat generalized remarks on a matter concerning 
which I had some experimental knowledge, derived from the 
use of such eyes and ears as Nature had been pleased to endow 
me withal, and such report as I had been able to win from them. 
The subject which most readily suggested itself was the spirit 
and the working of those conceptions of life and polity which 
are lumped together, whether for reproach or commendation, 
under the name of Democracy. By temperament and educa- 
tion of a conservative turn, I saw the last years of that quaint 
Arcadia which French travellers saw with delighted amaze- 
ment a century ago, and have watched the change (to me a sad 
one) from an agricultural to a proletary population. The testi- 
mony of Balaam 1 should carry some conviction. I have grown 
to manhood and am now growing old with the growth of this 
system of government in my native land; have watched its 
advances, or what some would call its encroachments, gradual 
and irresistible as those of a glacier; have been an ear-witness 
to the forebodings of wise and good and timid men, and have 
lived to see those forebodings belied by the course of events, 
which is apt to show itself humorously careless of the reputa- 
tion of prophets. I recollect hearing a sagacious old gentleman ^ 
say in 1840 that the doing away with the property qualification 
for suffrage twenty years before had been the ruin of the State 
of Massachusetts; that it had put public credit and private 
estate alike at the mercy of demagogues. I lived to see that 
Commonwealth twenty odd years later paying the interest on 
her bonds in gold, though it cost her sometimes nearly three 
for one to keep her faith, and that while suffering an unparal- 
leled drain of men and treasure in helping to sustain the unity 
and self-respect of the nation. 

If universal suffrage has worked ill in our larger cities, as it 

certainly has, this has been mainly because the hands that 

wielded it were untrained to its use. There the election of a 

majority of the trustees of the public money is controlled by the 

1 Numbers xxii-xxiv. 



DEMOCRACY 551 

most ignorant and vicious of a population which has come to 
us from abroad, wholly unpracticed in self-government and 
incapable of assimilation by American habits and methods. 
But the finances of our towns, where the native tradition is 
still dominant and whose affairs are discussed and settled in a 
public assembly of the people, have been in general honestly 
and prudently administered. Even in manufacturing towns, 
where a majority of the voters live by their daily wages, it is 
not so often the recklessness as the moderation of public ex- 
penditure that surprises an old-fashioned observer. "The 
beggar is in the saddle at last," cries Proverbial Wisdom. 1 
"Why, in the name of all former experience, does n't he ride to 
the Devil?" Because in the very act of mounting he ceased to 
be a beggar and became part owner of the piece of property he 
bestrides. The last thing we need be anxious about is property. 
It always has friends or the means of making them. If riches 
have wings to fly away from their owner, they have wings also 
to escape danger. 

I hear America sometimes playfully accused of sending you 
all your storms, and am in the habit of parrying the charge by 
alleging that we are enabled to do this because, in virtue of our 
protective system, we can afford to make better bad weather 
than anybody else. And what wiser use could we make of it 
than to export it in return for the paupers which some European 
countries are good enough to send over to us who have not 
attained to the same skill in the manufacture of them? But 
bad weather is not the worst thing that is laid at our door. A 
French gentleman, not long ago, forgetting Burke's monition 
of how unwise it is to draw an indictment against a whole peo- 
ple, 2 has charged us with the responsibility of whatever he finds 
disagreeable in the morals or manners of his countrymen. If 
M. Zola or some other competent witness would only go into 
the box and tell us what those morals and manners were before 
our example corrupted them ! But I confess that I find little to 
interest and less to edify me in these international bandyings 
of "You're another." 

I shall address myself to a single point only in the long list of 
offences of which we are more or less gravely accused, because 

1 "Beggars mounted run their horses to death" is a proverb. 

2 In his speech on Conciliation with the American Colonies. 



»/ 



552 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

that really includes all the rest. It is that we are infecting the 
Old World with what seems to be thought the entirely new 
disease of Democracy. It is generally people who are in what 
are called easy circumstances who can afford the leisure to 
treat themselves to a handsome complaint, and these experi- 
ence an immediate alleviation when once they have found a 
sonorous Greek name to abuse it by. There is something con- 
solatory also, something nattering to their sense of personal 
dignity, and to that conceit of singularity which is the natural 
recoil from our uneasy consciousness of being commonplace, 
in thinking ourselves victims of a malady by which no one had 
ever suffered before. Accordingly they find it simpler to class 
under one comprehensive heading whatever they find offensive 
to their nerves, their tastes, their interests, or what they sup- 
pose to be their opinions, and christen it Democracy, much as 
physicians label every obscure disease gout, or as cross-grained 
fellows lay their ill-temper to the weather. But is it really a 
new ailment, and, if it be, is America answerable for it? Even 
if she were, would it account for the phylloxera, and hoof-and- 
mouth disease, and bad harvests, and bad English, and the 
German bands, and the Boers, and all the other discomforts 
with which these later days have vexed the souls of them that 
go in chariots? Yet I have seen the evil example of Democracy 
in America cited as the source and origin of things quite as 
heterogeneous and quite as little connected with it by any 
sequence of cause and effect. Surely this ferment is nothing 
new. It has been at work for centuries, and we are more con- 
scious of it only because in this age of publicity, where the 
newspapers offer a rostrum to whoever has a grievance, or 
fancies that he has, the bubbles and scum thrown up by it are 
more noticeable on the surface than in those dumb ages when 
there was a cover of silence and suppression on the cauldron. 
Bernardo Navagero, speaking of the Provinces of Lower 
Austria in 1546, tells us that "in them there are five sorts of 
persons, Clergy, Barons, Nobles, Burghers, and Peasants. Of 
these last no account is made, because they have no voice in the 
Diet." 1 

1 Below the Peasants, it should be remembered, was still another even more 
helpless class, the servile farm-laborers. The same witness informs us that of the 
extraordinary imposts the Peasants paid nearly twice as much in proportion to 



DEMOCRACY 553 

Nor was it among the people that subversive Or mistaken 
doctrines had their rise. A Father of the Church said that 
property was theft many centuries before Proudhon was born. 1 
Bourdaloue reaffirmed it. Montesquieu was the inventor of 
national workshops, and of the theory that the State owed 
every man a living. Nay, was not the Church herself the first 
organized Democracy? A few centuries ago the chief end of 
man was to keep his soul alive, and then the little kernel of 
leaven that sets the gases at work was religious, and produced 
the Reformation. Even in that, far-sighted persons like the 
Emperor Charles V saw the germ of political and social revo- 
lution. Now that the chief end of man seems to have become 
the keeping of the body alive, and as comfortably alive as 
possible, the leaven also has become wholly political and social. 
But there had also been social upheavals before the Reforma- 
tion and contemporaneously with it, especially among men of 
Teutonic race. The Reformation gave outlet and direction to 
an unrest already existing. Formerly the immense majority 
of men — our brothers — knew only their sufferings, their 
wants, and their desires. They are beginning now to know their 
opportunity and their power. All persons who see deeper than 
their plates are rather inclined to thank God for it than to 
bewail it, for the sores of Lazarus have a poison in them against 
which Dives has no antidote. 

There can be no doubt that the spectacle of a great and pros- 
perous Democracy on the other side of the Atlantic must react 
powerfully on the aspirations and political theories of men in 
the Old World who do not find things to their mind; but, 
whether for good or evil, it should not be overlooked that the 
acorn from which it sprang was ripened on the British oak. 
Every successive swarm that has gone out from this officina 
gentium 2 has, when left to its own instincts — may I not call 
them hereditary instincts? — assumed a more or less thor- 
oughly democratic form. This would seem to show, what I 

their estimated property as the Barons, Nobles, and Burghers together. More- 
over, the upper classes were assessed at their own valuation, while they arbi- 
trarily fixed that of the Peasants, who had no voice. (Relazioni degli Ambasciatori 
Veneti, serie i, tomo I, pp. 378, 379, 389.) [Author's note.] 

1 The Father is St- Ambrose. "Many centuries" later, in 1840, Proudhon, a 
French economist, published Qu' est-ce que la Propriety? 

* Workshop of the world. 



554 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

believe to be the fact, that the British Constitution, under 
whatever disguises of prudence or decorum, is essentially 
democratic. England, indeed, may be called a monarchy with 
democratic tendencies, the United States a democracy with 
conservative instincts. People are continually saying that 
America is in the air, and I am glad to think it is, since this 
means only that a clearer conception of human claims and 
human duties is beginning to be prevalent. The discontent 
with the existing order of things, however, pervaded the atmos- 
phere wherever the conditions were favorable, long before 
Columbus, seeking the back door of Asia, found himself knock- 
ing at the front door of America. I say wherever the conditions 
were favorable, for it is certain that the germs of disease do 
not stick or find a prosperous field for their development and 
noxious activity unless where the simplest sanitary precau- 
tions have been neglected. "For this effect defective comes by 
cause," as Polonius said long ago. 1 It is only by instigation 
of the wrongs of men that what are called the Rights of Man 
become turbulent and dangerous. It is then only that they 
syllogize unwelcome truths. It is not the insurrections of 
ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of intelligence : — 

"The wicked and the weak rebel in vain, 
Slaves by their own compulsion." 

Had the governing classes in France during the last century 
paid as much heed to their proper business as to their pleasures 
or manners, the guillotine need never have severed that spinal 
marrow of orderly and secular tradition through which in a 
normally constituted state the brain sympathizes with the 
extremities and sends will and impulsion thither. It is only 
when the reasonable and practicable are denied that men de- 
mand the unreasonable and impracticable; only when the 
possible is made difficult that they fancy the impossible to be 
easy. Fairy tales are made out of the dreams of the poor. No; 
the sentiment which lies at the root of democracy is nothing 
new. I am speaking always of a sentiment, a spirit, and not of 
a form of government; for this was but the outgrowth of the 
other and not its cause. This sentiment is merely an expression 
of the natural wish of people to have a hand, if need be a con- 

1 Hamlet , n, ii. 



DEMOCRACY 555 

trolling hand, in the management of their own affairs. What is 
new is that they are more and more gaining that control, and 
learning more and more how to be worthy of it. What we used 
to call the tendency or drift — what we are being taught to 
call more wisely the evolution of things — has for some time 
been setting steadily in this direction. There is no good in 
arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with 
an east wind is to put on your overcoat. And in this case, also, 
the prudent will prepare themselves to encounter what they 
cannot prevent. Some people advise us to put on the brakes, 
as if the movement of which we are conscious were that of a 
railway train running down an incline. But a metaphor is no 
argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one 
home and imbed it in the memory. Our disquiet comes of what 
nurses and other experienced persons call growing-pains, and 
need not seriously alarm us. They are what every generation 
before us — certainly every generation since the invention of 
printing — has gone through with more or less good fortune. 
To the door of every generation there comes a knocking, and 
unless the household, like the Thane of Cawdor 1 and his wife, 
have been doing some deed without a name, they need not 
shudder. It turns out at worst to be a poor relation who wishes 
to come in out of the cold. The porter always grumbles and is 
slow to open. "Who's there, in the name of Beelzebub?" he 
mutters. Not a change for the better in our human house- 
keeping has ever taken place that wise and good men have not 
opposed it, — have not prophesied with the alderman that the 
world would wake up to find its throat cut in consequence of it. 
The world, on the contrary, wakes up, rubs its eyes, yawns, 
stretches itself, and goes about its business as if nothing had 
happened. Suppression of the slave trade, abolition of slavery, 
trade unions, — at all of these excellent people shook their 
heads despondingly, and murmured "Ichabod." 2 But the 
trade unions are now debating instead of conspiring, and we all 
read their discussions with comfort and hope, sure that they 
are learning the business of citizenship and the difficulties of 
practical legislation. 

One of the most curious of these frenzies of exclusion was that 
against the emancipation of the Jews. All share in the govern- 
1 Macbeth, n, ii. 2 i Samuel, iv, 21. 



556 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

ment of the world was denied for centuries to perhaps the 
ablest, certainly the most tenacious, race that had ever lived 
in it — the race to whom we owed our religion and the purest 
spiritual stimulus and consolation to be found in all literature 
— a race in which ability seems as natural and hereditary as 
the curve of their noses, and whose blood, furtively mingling 
with the bluest bloods in Europe, has quickened them with its 
own indomitable impulsion. We drove them into a corner, but 
they had their revenge, as the wronged are always sure to have 
it sooner or later. They made their corner the counter and 
banking-house of the world, and thence they rule it and us 
with the ignobler sceptre of finance. Your grandfathers mobbed 
Priestley 1 only that you might set up his statue and make 
Birmingham the headquarters of English Unitarianism. We 
hear it said sometimes that this is an age of transition, as if 
that made matters clearer; but can any one point us to an age 
that was not? If he could, he would show us an age of stagna- 
tion. The question for us, as it has been for all before us, is 
to make the transition gradual and easy, to see that our points 
are right so that the train may not come to grief. For we 
should remember that nothing is more natural for people whose 
education has been neglected than to spell evolution with an 
initial "r." A great man struggling with the storms of fate has 
been called a sublime spectacle; but surely a great man wrest- 
ling with these new forces that have come into the world, mas- 
tering them and controlling them to beneficent ends, would be 
a yet sublimer. Here is not a danger, and if there were it would 
be only a better school of manhood, a nobler scope for ambition. 
I have hinted that what people are afraid of in democracy is 
less the thing itself than what they conceive to be its necessary 
adjuncts and consequences. It is supposed to reduce all man- 
kind to a dead level of mediocrity in character and culture, to 
vulgarize men's conceptions of life, and therefore their code of 
morals, manners, and conduct — to endanger the rights of 
property and possession. But I believe that the real gravamen 
of the charges lies in the habit it has of making itself generally 
disagreeable by asking the Powers that Be at the most incon- 
venient moment whether they are the powers that ought to be. 

1 Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), an English Dissenting minister, noted as the 
discoverer of oxygen. 



DEMOCRACY "557 

If the powers that be are in a condition to give a satisfactory- 
answer to this inevitable question, they need feel in no way 
discomfited by it. 

Few people take the trouble of trying to find out what de- 
mocracy really is. Yet this would be a great help, for it is our 
' lawless and uncertain thoughts, it is the indefiniteness of our 
impressions, that fill darkness, whether mental or physical, 
with spectres and hobgoblins. Democracy is nothing more than 
an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new 
soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall 
on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is 
no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in 
mechanics. President Lincoln defined democracy to be "the 
government of the people by the people for the people." This 
is a sufficiently compact statement of it as a political arrange- 
ment. Theodore Parker said that "Democracy meant not 
'I'm as good as you are,' but 'You're as good as I am.' " And 
this is the ethical conception of it, necessary as a complement 
of the other; a conception which, could it be made actual and 
practical, would easily solve all the riddles that the old sphinx 
of political and social economy who sits by the roadside has 
been proposing to mankind from the beginning, and which 
mankind have shown such a singular talent for answering 
wrongly. In this sense Christ was the first true democrat that 
ever breathed, as the old dramatist Dekker said he was the 
first true gentleman. The characters may be easily doubled, 
so strong is the likeness between them. A beautiful and pro- 
found parable of the Persian poet Jellaladeen tells us that 
"One knocked at the Beloved's door, and a voice asked from 
within 'Who is there?' and he answered 'It is I.' Then the 
voice said, 'This house will not hold me and thee'; and the 
door was not opened. Then went the lover into the desert 
and fasted and prayed in solitude, and after a year he re- 
turned and knocked again at the door; and again the voice 
asked 'Who is there?' and he said 'It is thyself; and the 
door was opened to him." But that is idealism, you will say, 
and this is an only too practical world. I grant it; but I am 
one of those who believe that the real will never find an irre- 
movable basis till it rests on the ideal. It used to be thought 
that a democracy was possible only in a small territory, and 



558 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

this is doubtless true of a democracy strictly defined, for in 
such all the citizens decide directly upon every question of 
public concern in a general assembly. An example still sur- 
vives in the tiny Swiss canton of Appenzell. But this imme- 
diate intervention of the people in their own affairs is not of 
the essence of democracy; it is not necessary, nor indeed, in 
most cases, practicable. Democracies to which Mr. Lincoln's 
definition would fairly enough apply have existed, and now 
exist, in which, though the supreme authority reside in the 
people, yet they can act only indirectly on the national policy. 
v This generation has seen a democracy with an imperial figure- 
head, and in all that have ever existed the body politic has 
never embraced all the inhabitants included within its terri- 
tory: the right to share in the direction of affairs has been con- 
fined to citizens, and citizenship has been further restricted by 
various limitations, sometimes of property, sometimes of nativ- 
ity, and always of age and sex. 

The framers of the American Constitution were far from 
wishing or intending to found a democracy in the strict sense of 
the word, though, as was inevitable, every expansion of the 
scheme of government they elaborated has been in a demo- 
cratical direction. But this has been generally the slow result of 
growth, and not the sudden innovation of theory; in fact, they 
had a profound disbelief in theory, and knew better than to 
commit the folly of breaking with the past. They were not 
seduced by the French fallacy that a new system of government 
could be ordered like a new suit of clothes. They would as soon 
have thought of ordering a new suit of flesh and skin. It is 
only on the roaring loom of time that the stuff is woven for 
such a vesture of their thought and experience as they were 
meditating. They recognized fully the value of tradition and 
habit as the great allies of permanence and stability. They all 
had that distaste for innovation which belonged to their race, 
and many of them a distrust of human nature derived from 
their creed. The day of sentiment was over, and no dithyram- 
bic affirmations or fine-drawn analyses of the Rights of Man 
would serve their present turn. This was a practical question, 
and they addressed themselves to it as men of knowledge and 
judgment should. Their problem was how to adapt English 
principles and precedents to the new conditions of American 



DEMOCRACY 559 

life, and they solved it with singular discretion. They put as 
many obstacles as they could contrive, not in the way of the 
people's will, but of their whim. With few exceptions they 
probably admitted the logic of the then accepted syllogism, — 
democracy, anarchy, despotism. But this formula was framed 
upon the experience of small cities shut up to stew within their 
narrow walls, where the number of citizens made but an in- 
considerable fraction of the inhabitants, where every passion 
was reverberated from house to house and from man to man 
with gathering rumor till every impulse became gregarious and 
therefore inconsiderate, and every popular assembly needed 
but an infusion of eloquent sophistry to turn it into a mob, all 
the more dangerous because sanctified with the formality of 
law. 1 

Fortunately their case was wholly different. They were to 
legislate for a widely scattered population and for States al- 
ready practised in the discipline of a partial independence. 
They had an unequalled opportunity and enormous advan- 
tages. The material they had to work upon was already demo- 
cratical by instinct and habitude. It was tempered to their 
hands by more than a century's schooling in self-government. 
They had but to give permanent and conservative form to a 
ductile mass. In giving impulse and direction to their new insti- 
tutions, especially in supplying them with checks and balances, 
they had a great help and safeguard in their federal organiza- 
tion. The different, sometimes conflicting, interests and social 
systems of the several States made existence as a Union and 
coalescence into a nation conditional on a constant practice of 
moderation and compromise. The very elements of disintegra- 
tion were the best guides in political training. Their children 
learned the lesson of compromise only too well, and it was the 
application of it to a question of fundamental morals that cost 
us our civil war. We learned once for all that compromise 
makes a good umbrella but a poor roof; that it is a temporary 
expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise 
in statesmanship. 

Has not the trial of democracy in America proved, on the 

1 The effect of the electric telegraph in reproducing this trooping of emotion 
and perhaps of opinion is yet to be measured. The effect of Darwinism as a dis- 
integrator of humanitarianism is also to be reckoned with. [Author's note.] 



560 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

whole, successful? If it had not, would the Old World be vexed 
with any fears of its proving contagious? This trial would have 
been less severe could it have been made with a people homo- 
geneous in race, language, and traditions, whereas the United 
States have been called on to absorb and assimilate enormous 
masses of foreign population, heterogeneous in all these respects, 
and drawn mainly from that class which might fairly say that 
the world was not their friend, nor the world's law. The previ- 
ous condition too often justified the traditional Irishman, who, 
landing in New York and asked what his politics were, inquired 
if there was a Government there, and on being told that there 
was, retorted, "Thin I'm agin it!" We have taken from 
Europe the poorest, the most ignorant, the most turbulent of 
her people, and have made them over into good citizens, who 
have added to our wealth, and who are ready to die in defence 
of a country and of institutions which they know to be worth 
dying for. The exceptions have been (and they are lamentable 
exceptions) where these hordes of ignorance and poverty have 
coagulated in great cities. But the social system is yet to seek 
which has not to look the same terrible wolf in the eyes. On 
the other hand, at this very moment Irish peasants are buying 
up the worn-out farms of Massachusetts, and making them 
productive again by the same virtues of industry and thrift 
that once made them profitable to the English ancestors of the 
men who are deserting them. To have achieved even these 
prosaic results (if you choose to call them so) , and that out of 
materials the most discordant, — I might say the most recalci- 
trant, — argues a certain beneficent virtue in the system that 
could do it, and is not to be accounted for by mere luck. Car- 
lyle said scornfully that America meant only roast turkey every 
day for everybody. He forgot that States, as Bacon said of 
wars, go on their bellies. As for the security of property, it 
should be tolerably well secured in a country where every other 
man hopes to be rich, even though the only property qualifica- 
tion be the ownership of two hands that add to the general 
wealth. Is it not the best security for anything to interest the 
largest possible number of persons in its preservation and the 
smallest in its division? In point of fact, far-seeing men count 
the increasing power of wealth and its combinations as one of 
the chief dangers with which the institutions of the United 



DEMOCRACY 561 

States are threatened in the not distant future. The right of 
individual property is no doubt the very corner-stone of civili- 
zation as hitherto understood, but I am a little impatient of 
being told that property is entitled to exceptional considera- 
tion because it bears all burdens of the State. It bears those, 
indeed, which can most easily be borne, but poverty pays with 
its person the chief expenses of war, pestilence, and famine. 
Wealth should not forget this, for poverty is beginning to 
think of it now and then. Let me not be misunderstood. I see 
as clearly as any man possibly can, and rate as highly, the 
value of wealth, and of hereditary wealth, as the security of 
refinement, the feeder of all those arts that ennoble and beautify 
life, and as making a country worth living in. Many an ances- 
tral hall here in England has been a nursery of that culture 
which has been of example and benefit to all. Old gold has a 
civilizing virtue which new gold must grow old to be capable 
of secreting. 

I should not think of coming before you to defend or to criti- 
cise any form of government. All have their virtues, all their 
defects, and all have illustrated one period or another in the 
history of the race, with signal services to humanity and cul- 
ture. There is not one that could stand a cynical cross-exami- 
nation by an experienced criminal lawyer, except that of a per- 
fectly wise and perfectly good despot, such as the world has 
never seen, except in that white-haired king of Browning's, 
who 

"Lived long ago 
In the morning of the world, 
When Earth was nearer Heaven than now." 

The English race, if they did not invent government by dis- 
cussion, have at least carried it nearest to perfection in practice. 
It seems a very safe and reasonable contrivance for occupying 
the attention of the country, and is certainly a better way of 
settling questions than by push of pike. Yet, if one should ask 
it why it should not rather be called government by gabble, it 
would have to fumble in its pocket a good while before it found 
the change for a convincing reply. As matters stand, too, it is 
beginning to be doubtful whether Parliament and Congress sit 
at Westminster and Washington or in the editors' rooms of the 
leading journals, so thoroughly is everything debated before 



562 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

the authorized and responsible debaters get on their legs. And 
what shall we say of government by a majority of voices? To 
a person who in the last century would have called himself an 
Impartial Observer, a numerical preponderance seems, on the 
whole, as clumsy a way of arriving at truth as could well be 
devised, but experience has apparently shown it to be a con- 
venient arrangement for determining what may be expedient 
or advisable or practicable at any given moment. Truth, after 
all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too 
tedious to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the bot- 
tom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks 
down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is 
persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she 
is far better-looking than he had imagined. 

The arguments against universal suffrage are equally unan- 
swerable. "What," we exclaim, "shall Tom, Dick, and Harry 
have as much weight in the scale as I?" Of course, nothing 
could be more absurd. And yet universal suffrage has not been 
the instrument of greater unwisdom than contrivances of a 
more select description. Assemblies could be mentioned com- 
posed entirely of Masters of Arts and Doctors in Divinity 
which have sometimes shown traces of human passion or preju- 
dice in their votes. Have the Serene Highnesses and Enlight- 
ened Classes carried on the business of Mankind so well, then, 
that there is no use in trying a less costly method ? The demo- 
cratic theory is that those Constitutions are likely to prove 
steadiest which have the broadest base, that the right to vote 
makes a safety-valve of every voter, and that the best way of 
teaching a man how to vote is to give him the chance of prac- 
tice. For the question is no longer the academic one, "Is it 
wise to give every man the ballot?" but rather the practical 
one, "Is it prudent to deprive whole classes of it any longer?" 
It may be conjectured that it is cheaper in the long run to lift 
men up than to hold them down, and that the ballot in their 
hands is less dangerous to society than a sense of wrong in their 
heads. At any rate this is the dilemma to which the drift of 
opinion has been for some time sweeping us, and in politics a 
dilemma is a more unmanageable thing to hold by the horns 
than a wolf by the ears. It is said that the right of suffrage is 
not valued when it is indiscriminately bestowed, and there may 



DEMOCRACY 563 

be some truth in this, for I have observed that what men prize 
most is a privilege, even if it be that of chief mourner at a 
funeral. But is there not danger that it will be valued at more 
than its worth if denied, and that some illegitimate way will be 
sought to make up for the want of it? Men who have a voice 
in public affairs are at once affiliated with one or other of the 
great parties between which society is divided, merge their 
individual hopes and opinions in its safer, because more gen- 
eralized, hopes and opinions, are disciplined by its tactics, and 
acquire, to a certain degree, the orderly qualities of an army. 
They no longer belong to a class, but to a body corporate. Of 
one thing, at least, we may be certain, that, under whatever 
method of helping things to go wrong man's wit can contrive, 
those who have the divine right to govern will be found to gov- 
ern in the end, and that the highest privilege to which the 
majority of mankind can aspire is that of being governed by 
those wiser than they. Universal suffrage has in the United 
States sometimes been made the instrument of inconsiderate 
changes, under the notion of reform, and this from a miscon- 
ception of the true meaning of popular government. One of 
these has been the substitution in many of the States of popu- 
lar election for official selection in the choice of judges. The 
same system applied to military officers was the source of much 
evil during our civil war, and, I believe, had to be abandoned. 
But it has been also true that on all great questions of national 
policy a reserve of prudence and discretion has been brought 
out at the critical moment to turn the scale in favor of a wiser 
decision. An appeal to the reason of the people has never been 
known to fail in the long run. It is, perhaps, true that, by • 
effacing the principle of passive obedience, democracy, ill 
understood, has slackened the spring of that ductility to disci- 
pline which is essential to "the unity and married calm of 
States." But I feel assured that experience and necessity will 
cure this evil, as they have shown their power to cure others. 
And under what frame of policy have evils ever been remedied 
till they became intolerable, and shook men out of their indo- 
lent indifference through their fears? 

We are told that the inevitable result of democracy is to sap 
the foundations of personal independence, to weaken the prin- 
ciple of authority, to lessen the respect due to eminence, 



564 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

whether in station, virtue, or genius. If these things were so, 
society could not hold together. Perhaps the best forcing-house 
of robust individuality would be where public opinion is in- 
clined to be most overbearing, as he must be of heroic temper 
who should walk along Piccadilly at the height of the season 
in a soft hat. As for authority, it is one of the symptoms of the 
time that the religious reverence for it is declining everywhere, 
but this is due partly to the fact that state-craft is no longer 
looked upon as a mystery, but as a business, and partly to the 
decay of superstition, by which I mean the habit of respecting 
what we are told to respect rather than what is respectable in 
itself. There is more rough and tumble in the American democ- 
racy than is altogether agreeable to people of sensitive nerves 
and refined habits, and the people take their political duties 
lightly and laughingly, as is, perhaps, neither unnatural nor 
unbecoming in a young giant. Democracies can no more jump 
away from their own shadows than the rest of us can. They no 
doubt sometimes make mistakes and pay honor to men who do 
not deserve it. But they do this because they believe them 
worthy of it, and though it be true that the idol is the measure 
of the worshipper, yet the worship has in it the germ of a 
nobler religion. But is it democracies alone that fall into these 
errors? I, who have seen it proposed to erect a statue to Hud- 
son the railway king, l and have heard Louis Napoleon hailed 
as the saviour of society by men who certainly had no demo- 
cratic associations or leanings, am not ready to think so. But 
democracies have likewise their finer instincts. I have also seen 
the wisest statesman and most pregnant speaker of our gener- 
ation, a man of humble birth and ungainly manners, of little 
culture beyond what his own genius supplied, become more 
absolute in power than any monarch of modern times through 
the reverence of his countrymen for his honesty, his wisdom, 
his sincerity, his faith in God and man, and the nobly humane 
simplicity of his character. And I remember another whom 
popular respect enveloped as with a halo, the least vulgar of 
men, the most austerely genial, and the most independent of 
opinion. Wherever he went he never met a stranger, but every- 
where neighbors and friends proud of him as their ornament 

1 George Hudson, an English railway director, whose prosperity grew apace 
until his dishonorable methods were discovered. 



DEMOCRACY 565 

and decoration. Institutions which could bear and breed such 
men as Lincoln and Emerson had surely, some energy for good. 
No, amid all the fruitless turmoil and miscarriage of the world, 
if there be one thing steadfast and of favorable omen, one thing 
to make optimism distrust its own obscure distrust, it is the 
rooted instinct in men to admire what is better and more 
beautiful than themselves. The touchstone of political and 
social institutions is their ability to supply them with worthy 
objects of this sentiment, which is the very tap-root of civiliza- 
tion and progress. There would seem to be no readier way of 
feeding it with the elements of growth and vigor than such an 
organization of society as will enable men to respect themselves, 
and so to justify them in respecting others. 

Such a result is quite possible under other conditions than 
those of an avowedly democratical Constitution. For I take it 
that the real essence of democracy was fairly enough defined 
by the First Napoleon when he said that the French Revolu- 
tion meant " la carriere ouverte aux talents " — a clear pathway 
for merit of whatever kind. I should be inclined to paraphrase 
this by calling democracy that form of society, no matter what 
its political classification, in which every man had a chance 
and knew that he had it. If a man can climb, and feels him- 
self encouraged to climb, from a coalpit to the highest posi- 
tion for which he is fitted, he can well afford to be indifferent 
what name is given to the government under which he lives. 
The Bailli of Mirabeau, uncle of the more famous tribune of 
that name, wrote in 1771: "The English are, in my opinion, a 
hundred times more agitated and more unfortunate than the 
very Algerines themselves, because they do not know and will 
not know till the destruction of their over-swollen power, which 
I believe very near, whether they are monarchy, aristocracy, or 
democracy, and wish to play the part of all three." England 
has not been obliging enough to fulfil the Bailli's prophecy, and 
perhaps it was this very carelessness about the name, and con- 
cern about the substance of popular government, this skill in 
getting the best out of things as they are, in utilizing all the 
motives which influence men, and in giving one direction to 
many impulses, that has been a principal factor of her greatness 
and power. Perhaps it is fortunate to have an unwritten Con- 
stitution, for men are prone to be tinkering the work of their 



5 66 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

own hands, whereas they are more willing to let time and cir- 
cumstance mend or modify what time and circumstance have 
made. All free governments, whatever their name, are in reality 
governments by public opinion, and it is on the quality of this 
public opinion that their prosperity depends. It is, therefore, 
their first duty to purify the element from which they draw the 
breath of life. With the growth of democracy grows also the 
fear, if not the danger, that this atmosphere may be corrupted 
with poisonous exhalations from lower and more malarious 
levels, and the question of sanitation becomes more instant and 
pressing. Democracy in its best sense is merely the letting in of 
light and air. Lord Sherbrooke, 1 with his usual epigrammatic 
terseness, bids you educate your future rulers. But would this 
alone be a sufficient safeguard? To educate the intelligence is 
to enlarge the horizon of its desires and wants. And it is well 
that this should be so. But the enterprise must go deeper and 
prepare the way for satisfying those desires and wants in so far 
as they are legitimate. What is really ominous of danger to the 
existing order of things is not democracy (which, properly 
understood, is a conservative force), but the Socialism which 
may find a fulcrum in it. If we cannot equalize conditions and 
fortunes any more than we can equalize the brains of men — 
and a very sagacious person has said that "where two men ride 
of a horse one must ride behind" — we can yet, perhaps, do 
something to correct those methods and influences that lead to 
enormous inequalities, and to prevent their growing more enor- 
mous. It is all very well to pooh-pooh Mr. George 2 and to 
prove him mistaken in his political economy. I do not believe 
that land should be divided because the quantity of it is lim- 
ited by nature. Of what may this not be said? A fortiori, we 
might on the same principle insist on a division of human wit, 
for I have observed that the quantity of this has been even 
more inconveniently limited. Mr. George himself has an in- 
equitably large share of it. But he is right in his impelling mo- 
tive; right, also, I am convinced, in insisting that humanity 
makes a part, by far the most important part, of political econ- 
omy; and in thinking man to be of more concern and more con- 

x Robert Lowe, Viscount Sherbrooke (1811-92), an English politician. 
2 Henry George (1839-97), author of Progress and Poverty and leader in 
the Single Tax movement. 



DEMOCRACY 567 

vincing than the longest columns of figures in the world. For 
unless you include human nature in your addition, your total is 
sure to be wrong and your deductions from it fallacious. Com- 
munism means barbarism, but Socialism means, or wishes to 
mean, cooperation and community of interests, sympathy, the 
giving to the hands not so large a share as to the brains, but a 
larger share than hitherto in the wealth they must combine to 
produce — means, in short, the practical application of Chris- 
tianity to life, and has in it the secret of an orderly and benign 
reconstruction. State Socialism would cut off the very roots 
in personal character — self-help, forethought, and frugality — 
which nourish and sustain the trunk and branches of every 
vigorous Commonwealth. 

I do not believe in violent changes, nor do I expect them. 
Things in possession have a very firm grip. One of the strong- 
est cements of society is the conviction of mankind that the 
state of things into which they are born is a part of the order 
of the universe, as natural, let us say, as that the sun should go 
round the earth. It is a conviction that they will not surrender 
except on compulsion, and a wise society should look to it that 
this compulsion be not put upon them. For the individual man 
there is no radical cure, outside of human nature itself, for the 
evils to which human nature is heir. The rule will always hold 
good that you must 

"Be your own palace or the world's your gaol." 

But for artificial evils, for evils that spring from want of 
thought, thought must find a remedy somewhere. There has 
been no period of time in which wealth has been more sensible 
of its duties than now. It builds hospitals, it establishes mis- 
sions among the poor, it endows schools. It is one of the advan- 
tages of accumulated wealth, and of the leisure it renders pos- 
sible, that people have time to think of the wants and sorrows 
of their fellows. But all these remedies are partial and pallia- 
tive merely. It is as if we should apply plasters to a single pus- 
tule of the small-pox with a view of driving out the disease. 
The true way is to discover and to extirpate the germs. As 
society is now constituted these are in the air it breathes, in the 
water it drinks, in things that seem, and which it has always 
believed, to be the most innocent and healthful. The evil ele- 



568 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

ments it neglects corrupt these in their springs and pollute them 
in their courses. Let us be of good cheer, however, remember- 
ing that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never 
come. The world has outlived much, and will outlive a great 
deal more, and men have contrived to be happy in it. It has 
shown the strength of its constitution in nothing more than in 
surviving the quack medicines it has tried. In the scales of the 
destinies brawn will never weigh so much as brain. Our healing 
is not in the storm or in the whirlwind, it is not in monarchies, 
or aristocracies, or democracies, but will be revealed by the 
still small voice that speaks to the conscience and the heart, 
prompting us to a wider and wiser humanity. 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 
THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 1 



I was just going to say, when I was interrupted, that one of 
the many ways of classifying minds is under the heads of arith- 
metical and algebraical intellects. All economical and practical 
wisdom is an extension or variation of the following arith- 
metical formula: 2 + 2=4. Every philosophical proposition 
has the more general character of the expression a + b =c. We 
are mere operatives, empirics, and egotists, until we learn to 
think in letters instead of figures. 

They all stared. There is a divinity student lately come 
among us to whom I commonly address remarks like the above, 
allowing him to take a certain share in the conversation, so far 
as assent or pertinent questions are involved. He abused his 
liberty on this occasion by presuming to say that Leibnitz had 
the same observation. — No, sir, I replied, he has not. But he 
said a mighty good thing about mathematics, that sounds 
something like it, and you found it, not in the original, but 
quoted by Dr. Thomas Reid. I will tell the company what he 
did say, one of these days. 

1 "The interruption referred to in the first sentence of the first of these papers 
was just a quarter of a century in duration. 

"Two articles entitled The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table will be found in the 
New England Magazine, formerly published in Boston by J. T. and E. Bucking- 
ham. The date of the first of these articles is November, 1831, and that of the 
second February, 1832. When the Atlantic Monthly was begun, twenty-five 
years afterwards, and the author was asked to write for it, the recollection of 
these crude products of his uncombed literary boyhood suggested the thought 
that it would be a curious experiment to shake the same bough again, and see if 
the ripe fruit were better or worse than the early windfalls. 

"So began this series of papers, which naturally brings those earlier attempts to 
my own notice and that of some few friends who were idle enough to read them 
at the time of their publication. The man is father to the boy that was, and I 
am my own son, as it seems to me, in those papers of the New England Magazine. 
If I find it hard to pardon the boy's faults, others would find it harder. They will 
not, therefore, be reprinted here, nor, as I hope, anywhere." (Holmes, "The 
Autocrat's Autobiography," which prefaces the book.) 



570 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

— If I belong to a Society of Mutual Admiration? — I blush 
to say that I do not at this present moment. I once did, how- 
ever. It was the first association to which I ever heard the 
term applied ; a body of scientific young men in a great foreign 
city 1 who admired their teacher, and to some extent each other. 
Many of them deserved it; they have become famous since. 
It amuses me to hear the talk of one of those beings described 
by Thackeray — 

"Letters four do form his name" — 2 

about a social development which belongs to the very noblest 
stage of civilization. All generous companies of artists, authors, 
philanthropists, men of science, are, or ought to be, Societies 
of Mutual Admiration. A man of genius, or any kind of superi- 
ority, is not debarred from admiring the same quality in an- 
other, nor the other from returning his admiration. They may 
even associate together and continue to think highly of each 
other. And so of a dozen such men, if any one place is fortu- 
nate enough to hold so many. The being referred to above 
assumes several false premises. First, that men of talent neces- 
sarily hate each other. Secondly, that intimate knowledge or 
habitual association destroys our admiration of persons whom 
we esteemed highly at a distance. Thirdly, that a circle of 
clever fellows, who meet together to dine and have a good time, 
have signed a constitutional compact to glorify themselves and 

1 The "body of scientific young men in a great foreign city" was the Societe 
d'Observation Medicale,- of Paris, of which M. Louis was president, and MM. 
Barth, Grisotte, and our own Dr. Bowditch were members. They agreed in 
admiring their justly-honored president, and thought highly of some of their 
associates, who have since made good their promise of distinction. 

About the time when these papers were published, the Saturday Club was 
founded, or, rather, found itself in existence, without any organization, almost 
without parentage. It was natural enough that such men as Emerson, Long- 
fellow, Agassiz, Peirce, with Hawthorne, Motley, Sumner, when within reach, 
and others who would be good company for them, should meet and dine together 
once in a while, as they did, in point of fact, every month, and as some who are 
still living, with other and newer members, still meet and dine. If some of them 
had not admired each other they would have been exceptions in the world of 
letters and science. The club deserves being remembered for having no constitu- 
tion or by-laws, for making no speeches, reading no papers, observing no cere- 
monies, coming and going at will without remark, and acting out, though it did 
not proclaim the motto, "Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?" There was 
and is nothing of the Bohemian element about this club, but it has had many 
good times and not a little good talking. [Author's note,] 

2 Coleridge on Pitt. Thackeray's virtuosity in scenting out snobs is notorious. 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 571 

to put down him and the fraction of the human race not be- 
longing to their number. Fourthly, that it is an outrage that 
he is not asked to join them. 

Here the company laughed a good deal, and the old gentle- 
man who sits opposite said: "That's it, that's it!" 

I continued, for I was in the talking vein. As to clever peo- 
ple's hating each other, I think a little extra talent does some- 
times make people jealous. They become irritated by perpetual 
attempts and failures, and it hurts their tempers and disposi- 
tions. Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; 
but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially common person is 
detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace 
character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wine-glass spoil a 
draught of fair water. No wonder the poor fellow we spoke of, 
who always belongs to this class of slightly flavored mediocri- 
ties, is puzzled and vexed by the strange sight of a dozen men 
of capacity working and playing together in harmony. He and 
his fellows are always fighting. With them familiarity natu- 
rally breeds contempt. If they ever praise each other's bad 
drawings, or broken-winded novels, or spavined verses, no- 
body ever supposed it was from admiration; it was simply a 
contract between themselves and a publisher or dealer. 

If the Mutuals have really nothing among them worth 
admiring, that alters the question. But if they are men with 
noble powers and qualities, let me tell you that, next to youth- 
ful love and family affections, there is no human sentiment 
better than that which unites the Societies of Mutual Admira- 
tion. And what would literature or art be without such associa- 
tions? Who can tell what we owe to the Mutual Admiration 
Society of which Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson, and Beaumont 
and Fletcher were members? Or to that of which Addison and 
Steele formed the centre, and which gave us the Spectator? 
Or to that where Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Burke, and 
Reynolds, and Beauclerk, and Boswell, most admiring among 
all admirers, met together? Was there any great harm in the 
fact that the Irvings and Paulding wrote in company? or any 
unpardonable cabal in the literary union of Verplanck and 
Bryant and Sands, and as many more as they chose to asso- 
ciate with them? 
The poor creature does not know what he is talking about 



572 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

when he abuses this noblest of institutions. Let him inspect its 
mysteries through the knot-hole he has secured, but hot use 
that orifice as a medium for his popgun. Such a society is the 
crown of a literary metropolis; if a town has not material for 
it, and spirit and good feeling enough to organize it, it is a 
mere caravansary, fit for a man of genius to lodge in, but not 
to live in. Foolish people hate and dread and envy such an 
association of men of varied powers and influence, because it is 
lofty, serene, impregnable, and, by the necessity of the case, 
exclusive. Wise ones are prouder of the title M. S. M. A. than 
of all their other honors put together. 

— All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly 
called "facts." They are the brute beasts of the intellectual 
domain. Who does not know fellows that always have an ill- 
conditioned fact or two which they lead after them into decent 
company like so many bull-dogs, ready to let them slip at every 
ingenious suggestion, or convenient generalization, or pleasant 
fancy? I allow no " facts " at this table. What! Because bread 
is good and wholesome, and necessary and nourishing, shall you 
thrust a crumb into my windpipe while I am talking? Do not 
these muscles of mine represent a hundred loaves of bread? 
and is not my thought the abstract of ten thousand of these 
crumbs of truth with which you would choke off my speech? 

[The above remark must be conditioned and qualified for 
the vulgar mind. The reader will, of course, understand the 
precise amount of seasoning which must be added to it before 
he adopts it as one of the axioms of his life. The speaker dis- 
claims all responsibility for its abuse in incompetent hands.] 

This business of conversation is a very serious matter. There 
are men whom it weakens one to talk with an hour more than 
a day's fasting would do. Mark this which I am going to say, 
for it is as good as a working professional man's advice, and 
costs you nothing : It is better to lose a pint of blood from your 
veins than to have a nerve tapped. Nobody measures your 
nervous force as it runs away, nor bandages your brain and 
marrow after the operation. 

There are men of esprit who are excessively exhausting to 
some people. They are the talkers who have what may be 
called jerky minds. Their thoughts do not run in the natural 
order of sequence. They say bright things on all possible 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 573 

subjects, but their zigzags rack you to death. After a jolting 
half-hour with one of these jerky companions, talking with a 
dull friend affords great relief. It is like taking the cat in your 
lap after holding a squirrel. 

What a comfort a dull but kindly person is, to be sure, at 
times! A ground-glass shade over a gas-lamp does not bring 
more solace to our dazzled eyes than such a one to our minds. 

"Do not dull people bore you?" said one of the lady- 
boarders, — the same who sent me her autograph-book last 
week with a request for a few original stanzas, not remember- 
ing that "The Pactolian" pays me five dollars a line for every 
thing I write in its columns. 

"Madam," said I (she and the century were in their teens 
together), "all men are bores, except when we want them. 
There never was but one man whom I would trust with my 
latch-key." 

"Who might that favored person be?" 

"Zimmermann." * 

— The men of genius that I fancy most, have erectile heads 
like the cobra-di-capello. You remember what they tell of 
William Pinkney, the great pleader; how in his eloquent 
paroxysms the veins of his neck would swell and his face flush 
and his eyes glitter, until he seemed on the verge of apoplexy. 
The hydraulic arrangements for supplying the brain with blood 
are only second in importance to its own organization. The 
bulbous-headed fellows who steam well when they are at work 
are the men that draw big audiences and give us marrowy 
books and pictures. It is a good sign to have one's feet grow 
cold when he is writing. A great writer and speaker once told 
me that he often wrote with his feet in hot water; but for this, 
all his blood would have run into his head, as the mercury 
sometimes withdraws into the ball of a thermometer. 

— You don't suppose that my remarks made at this table 
are like so many postage-stamps, do you, — each to be only 
once uttered? If you do, you are mistaken. He must be a poor 
creature who does not often repeat himself. Imagine the author 
of the excellent piece of advice, "Know thyself," never allud- 

1 The Treatise on Solitude is not so frequently seen lying about on library 
tables as in our younger days. I remember that I always respected the title and 
let the book alone. [Author's note.] 



574 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

ing to that sentiment again during the course of a protracted 
existence! Why, the truths a man carries about with him are 
his tools; and do you think a carpenter is bound to use the same 
plane but once to smooth a knotty board with, or to hang up 
his hammer after it has driven its first nail? I shall never repeat 
a conversation, but an idea often. I shall use the same types 
when I like, but not commonly the same stereotypes. A 
thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred 
times. It has come to you over a new route, by a new and 
express train of associations. 

Sometimes, but rarely, one may be caught making the same 
speech twice over, and yet be held blameless. Thus, a certain 
lecturer, after performing in an inland city, where dwells a 
Litteratrice of note, was invited to meet her and others over the 
social teacup. She pleasantly referred to his many wanderings 
in his new occupation. "Yes," he replied, "I am like the 
Huma, 1 the bird that never lights, being always in the cars, 
as he is always on the wing." — Years elapsed. The lecturer 
visited the same place once more for the same purpose. An- 
other social cup after the lecture, and a second meeting with 
the distinguished lady. "You are constantly going from place 
to place," she said. — "Yes," he answered, "I am like the 
Huma," — and finished the sentence as before. 

What horrors, when it flashed over him that he had made 
this fine speech, word for word, twice over! Yet it was not 
true, as the lady might perhaps have fairly inferred, that he 
had embellished his conversation with the Huma daily during 
that whole interval of years. On the contrary, he had never 
once thought of the odious fowl until the recurrence of precisely 
the same circumstances brought up precisely the same idea. 
He ought to have been proud of the accuracy of his mental 
adjustments. Given certain factors, and a sound brain should 
always evolve the same fixed product with the certainty of 
Babbage's calculating machine. 

— What a satire, by the way, is that machine on the mere 
mathematician! A Frankenstein-monster, a thing without 

1 It was an agreeable incident of two consecutive visits to Hartford, Connecti- 
cut, that I met there the late Mrs. Sigourney. The second meeting recalled the 
first, and with it the allusion to the Huma, which bird is the subject of a short 
poem by another New England authoress, which may be found in Mr. Griswold's 
collection. [Author's note.] 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 575 

brains and without heart, too stupid to make a blunder; which 
turns out results like a corn-sheller, and never grows any wiser 
or better, though it grind a thousand bushels of them ! 

I have an immense respect for a man of talents plus "the 
mathematics." But the calculating power alone should seem 
to be the least human of qualities, and to have the smallest 
amount of reason in it; since a machine can be made to do the 
work of three or four calculators, and better than any one of 
them. Sometimes I have been troubled that I had not a deeper 
intuitive apprehension of the relations of numbers. But the 
triumph of the ciphering hand-organ has consoled me. I always 
fancy I can hear the wheels clicking in a calculator's brain. 
The power of dealing with numbers is a kind of "detached 
lever" arrangement, which may be put into a mighty poor 
watch. I suppose it is about as common as the power of moving 
the ears voluntarily, which is a moderately rare endowment. 

— Little localized powers, and little narrow streaks of spe- 
cialized knowledge, are things men are very apt to be conceited 
about. Nature is very wise; but for this encouraging principle 
how many small talents and little accomplishments would be 
neglected! Talk about conceit as much as you like, it is to 
human character what salt is to the ocean; it keeps it sweet, 
and renders it endurable. Say rather it is like the natural 
unguent of the sea-fowl's plumage, which enables him to shed 
the rain that falls on him and the wave in which he dips. When 
one has had all his conceit taken out of him, when he has lost all 
his illusions, his feathers will soon soak through, and he will 
fly no more. 

"So you admire conceited people, do you?" said the young 
lady who has come to the city to be finished off for — the duties 
of life. 

I am afraid you do not study logic at your school, my dear. 
It does not follow that I wish to be pickled in brine because I 
like a salt-water plunge at Nahant. I say that conceit is just 
as natural a thing to human minds as a centre is to a circle. 
But little-minded people's thoughts move in such small circles 
that five minutes' conversation gives you an arc long enough 
to determine their whole curve. An arc in the movement of a 
large intellect does not sensibly differ from a straight line. 
Even if it have the third vowel as its centre, it does not soon 



576 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

betray it. The highest thought, that is, is the most seemingly 
impersonal; it does not obviously imply any individual centre. 
Audacious self-esteem, with good ground for it, is always 
imposing. What resplendent beauty that must have been 
which could have authorized Phryne to "peel" in the way she 
did! 1 What fine speeches are those two: "Non omnis moriar," 2 
and "I have taken all knowledge to be my province " ! Even in 
common people, conceit has the virtue of making them cheer- 
ful; the man who thinks his wife, his baby, his house, his horse, 
his dog, and himself severally unequalled, is almost sure to be a 
good-humored person, though liable to be tedious at times. 

— What'are the great faults of conversation? Want of ideas, 
want of words, want of manners, are the principal ones, I sup- 
pose you think. I don't doubt it, but I will tell you what I have 
found spoil more good talks than anything else; — long argu- 
ments on special points between people who differ on the funda- 
mental principles upon which these points depend. No men 
can have satisfactory relations with each other until they have 
agreed on certain ultimata of belief not to be disturbed in ordi- 
nary conversation, and unless they have sense enough to trace 
the secondary questions depending upon these ultimate beliefs 
to their source. In short, just as a written constitution is essen- 
tial to the best social order, so a code of finalities is a necessary 
condition of profitable talk between two persons. Talking is 
like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hand 
on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to 
bring out their music. 

— Do you mean to say the pun-question is not clearly settled 
in your minds? Let me lay down the law upon the subject. 
Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide — 
that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its 
legitimate meaning, which is its life — are alike forbidden. 
Manslaughter, which is the meaning of the one, is the same as 
man's laughter, which is the end of the other. A pun is prima 
facie an insult to the person you are talking with. It implies 
utter indifference to or sublime contempt for his remarks, no 
matter how serious. I speak of total depravity, and one says 
all that is written on the subject is deep raving. I have com- 

1 Phryne, the Greek courtesan, disrobed before the tribunal. 

2 "I shall not altogether die." 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 577 

mitted my self-respect by talking with such a person. I should 
like to commit him, but cannot, because he is a nuisance. Or I 
speak of geological convulsions, and he asks me what was the 
cosine of Noah's ark; also, whether the Deluge was not a deal 
huger than any modern inundation. 

A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a 
blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury 
would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if 
the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of 
justifiable homicide. Thus, in a case lately decided before 
Miller, J., Doe presented Roe a subscription paper, and urged 
the claims of suffering humanity. Roe replied by asking, When 
charity was like a top? It was in evidence that Doe preserved 
a dignified silence. Roe then said, "When it begins to hum." 
Doe then — and not till then — struck Roe, and his head hap- 
pening to hit a bound volume of the Monthly Rag-Bag and 
Stolen Miscellany, intense mortification ensued, with a fatal 
result. The chief laid down his notions of the law to his 
brother justices, who unanimously replied, "Jest so." The 
chief rejoined, that no man should jest so without being pun- 
ished for it, and charged for the prisoner, who was acquitted, 
and the pun ordered to be burned by the sheriff. The bound 
volume was forfeited as a deodand, but not claimed. 

People that make puns are like wanton boys that put cop- 
pers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other 
children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of con- 
versation for the sake of a battered witticism. 

I will thank you, B. F., to bring down two books, of which I 
will mark the places on this slip of paper. (While he is gone, 
I may say that this boy, our landlady's youngest, is called 
Benjamin Franklin, after the celebrated philosopher of that 
name. A highly merited compliment.) 

I wished to refer to two eminent authorities. Now be so 
good as to listen. The great moralist says: "To trifle with the 
vocabulary which is the vehicle of social intercourse is to 
tamper with the currency of human intelligence. He who 
would violate the sanctities of his mother tongue would invade 
the recesses of the paternal till without remorse, and repeat the 
banquet of Saturn without an indigestion." 

And, once more, listen to the historian. "The Puritans hated 



578 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

puns. The Bishops were notoriously addicted to them. The 
Lords Temporal carried them to the verge of license. Majesty 
itself must have its Royal quibble. 'Ye be burly, my Lord of 
Burleigh/ said Queen Elizabeth, 'but ye shall make less stir in 
our realm than my Lord of Leicester.' The gravest wisdom and 
the highest breeding lent their sanction to the practice. Lord 
Bacon playfully declared himself a descendant of 'Og, the 
King of Bashan. Sir Philip Sidney, with his last breath, re- 
proached the soldier who brought him water, for wasting a 
casque full upon a dying man. A courtier, who saw Othello 
performed at the Globe Theatre, remarked, that the blacka- 
moor was a brute, and not a man. 'Thou hast reason/ replied 
a great Lord, 'according to Plato his saying; for this be a two- 
legged animal with feathers.' The fatal habit became universal. 
The language was corrupted. The infection spread to the na- 
tional conscience. Political double-dealings naturally grew out 
of verbal double meanings. The teeth of the new dragon were 
sown by the Cadmus who introduced the alphabet of equivo- 
cation. What was levity in the time of the Tudors grew to regi- 
cide and revolution in the age of the Stuarts." 

Who was that boarder that just whispered something about 
the Macaulay-rlowers of literature? — There was a dead silence. 

— I said calmly, I shall henceforth consider any interruption 
by a pun as a hint to change my boarding-house. Do not 
plead my example. If / have used any such, it has been 
only as a Spartan father would show up a drunken helot. We 
have done with them. 

— If a logical mind ever found out anything with its logic? 

— I should say that its most frequent work was to build a pons 
asinorum 1 over chasms which shrewd people can bestride with- 
out such a structure. You can hire logic, in the shape of a 
lawyer, to prove anything that you want to prove. You can 
buy treatises to show that Napoleon never lived, and that no 
battle of Bunker-hill was ever fought. The great minds are 
those with a wide span, 2 which couple truths related to, but 
far removed from, each other. Logicians carry the surveyor's 
chain over the track of which these are the true explorers. 

1 Bridge of fools. 

2 There is something like this in J. H. Newman's Grammar of Assent. See 
Characteristics, arranged by W. S. Lilly, p. 8i. [Author's note.] 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 579 

I value a man mainly for his primary relations with truth, as I 
understand truth, — not for any secondary artifice in handling 
his ideas. Some of the sharpest men in argument are notori- 
ously unsound in judgment. I should not trust the counsel of a 
clever debater, any more than that of a good chess-player. 
Either may of course advise wisely, but not necessarily because 
he wrangles or plays well. 

The old gentleman who sits opposite got his hand up, as a 
pointer lifts his forefoot, at the expression, "his relations with 
truth, as I understand truth," and when I had done, sniffed 
audibly, and said I talked like a transcendentalist. For his 
part, common sense was good enough for him. 

Precisely so, my dear sir, I replied; common sense, as you 
understand it. We all have to assume a standard of judgment 
in our own minds, either of things or persons. A man who is 
willing to take another's opinion has to exercise his judgment in 
the choice of whom to follow, which is often as nice a matter 
as to judge of things for one's self. On the whole, I had rather 
judge men's minds by comparing their thoughts with my own, 
than judge of thoughts by knowing who utter them. I must do 
one or the other. It does not follow, of course, that I may not 
recognize another man's thoughts as broader and deeper than 
my own; but that does not necessarily change my opinion, 
otherwise this would be at the mercy of every superior mind 
that held a different one. How many of our most cherished be- 
liefs are like those drinking-glasses of the ancient pattern, that 
serve us well so long as we keep them in our hand, but spill all 
if we attempt to set them down! I have sometimes compared 
conversation to the Italian game of mora, in which one player 
lifts his hand with so many fingers extended, and the other gives 
the number if he can. I show my thought, another his; if they 
agree, well; if they differ, we find the largest common factor, 
if we can, but at any rate avoid disputing about remainders 
and fractions, which is to real talk what tuning an instrument 
is to playing on it. 

— What if, instead of talking this morning, I should read 
you a copy of verses, with critical remarks by the author? Any 
of the company can retire that like. 



S8o OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 



ALBUM VERSES 

When Eve had led her lord away, 

And Cain had killed his brother, 
The stars and flowers, the poets say, 

Agreed with one another 

To cheat the cunning tempter's art, 

And teach the race its duty, 
By keeping on its wicked heart 

Their eyes of light and beauty. 

A million sleepless lids, they say, 

Will be at least a warning; 
And so the flowers would watch by day, 

The stars frpm eve to morning. 

On hill and prairie, field and lawn, 

Their dewy eyes upturning, 
The flowers still watch from reddening dawn 

Till western skies are burning. 

Alas! each hour of daylight tells 

A tale of shame so crushing, 
That some turn white as sea-bleached shells, 

And some are always blushing. 

But when the patient stars look down 

On all their light discovers, 
The traitor's smile, the murderer's frown, 

The lips of lying lovers, 

They try to shut their saddening eyes, 

And in the vain endeavor 
We see them twinkling in the skies, 

And so they wink forever. 

What do you think of these verses, my friends? — Is that 
piece an impromptu? said my landlady's daughter. (Aet. 19 + . 
Tender-eyed blonde. Long ringlets. Cameo pin. Gold pencil- 
case on a chain. Locket. Bracelet. Album. Autograph book. 
Accordeon. Reads Byron, Tupper, and Sylvanus Cobb, Junior, 
while her mother makes the puddings. Says "Yes? " when you 
tell her anything.) — Oui et non, ma petite, — Yes and no, my 
child. Five of the seven verses were written off-hand; the other 
two took a week, — that is, were hanging round the desk in a 



,THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 581 

ragged, forlorn, unrhymed condition as long as that. All poets 
will tell you just such stories. C'est le dernier pas qui coute. 1 
Don't you know how hard it is for some people to get out of a 
room after their visit is really over? They want to be off, and 
you want to have them off, but they don't know how to man- 
age it. One would think they had been built in your parlor or 
study, and were waiting to be launched. I have contrived a 
sort of ceremonial inclined plane for such visitors, which being 
lubricated with certain smooth phrases, I back them down, 
metaphorically speaking, stern-foremost, into their "native 
element," the great ocean of out-doors. Well, now, there are 
poems as hard to get rid of as these rural visitors. They come 
in glibly, use up all the serviceable rhymes, day, ray, beauty, 
duty, skies, eyes, other, brother, mountain, fountain, and the like; 
and so they go on until you think it is time for the wind-up, 
and the wind-up won't come on any terms. So they lie about 
until you get sick of the sight of them, and end by thrusting 
some cold scrap of a final couplet upon them, and turning them 
out of doors. I suspect a good many "impromptus" could tell 
just such a story as the above. — Here turning to our landlady, 
I used an illustration which pleased the company much at the 
time, and has since been highly commended. "Madam," I 
said, "you can pour three gills and three quarters of honey 
from that pint jug, if it is full, in less than one minute; but, 
Madam, you could not empty that last quarter of a gill, though 
you were turned into a marble Hebe, and held the vessel upside 
down for a thousand years." 

One gets tired to death of the old, old rhymes, such as you see 
in that copy of verses, — which I don't mean to abuse, or to 
praise either. I always feel as if I were a cobbler, putting new 
top-leathers to an old pair of boot-soles and bodies, when I am 
fitting sentiments to these venerable jingles. 

youth 

morning 

truth 

warning. 

Nine tenths of the "Juvenile Poems" written spring out of 
the above musical and suggestive coincidences. 



1 <t 



It's the last step that costs." 



582 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

"Yes?" said our landlady's daughter. 

I did not address the following remark to her, and I trust, 
from her limited range of reading, she will never see it; I said 
it softly to my next neighbor. 

When a young female wears a flat circular side-curl, gummed 
on each temple, — when she walks with a male, not arm in arm, 
but his arm against the back of hers, — and when she says 
"Yes?" with the note of interrogation, you are generally safe 
in asking her what wages she gets, and who the "feller" was 
you saw her with. 

"What were you whispering?" said the daughter of the 
house, moistening her lips, as she spoke, in a very engaging 
manner. 

"I was only laying down a principle of social diagnosis." 

"Yes?" 

— It is curious to see how the same wants and tastes find the 
same implements and modes of expression in all times and 
places. The young ladies of Otaheite, as you may see in Cook's 
Voyages, had a sort of. crinoline arrangement fully equal in 
radius to the largest spread of our own lady-baskets. When I 
fling a Bay-State shawl over my shoulders, I am only taking a 
lesson from the climate which the Indian had learned before 
me. A blanket-shawl we call it,' and not a plaid; and we wear 
it like the aborigines, and not like the Highlanders. 

— We are the Romans of the modern world, — the great 
assimilating people. Conflicts and conquests are of course 
necessary accidents with us, as with our prototypes. And so 
we come to their style of weapon. Our army sword is the short, 
stiff, pointed gladius of the Romans; and the American bowie- 
knife is the same tool, modified to meet the daily wants of civil 
society. I announce at this table an axiom not to be found in 
Montesquieu or the journals of Congress: — 

The race that shortens its weapons lengthens its boundaries. 
Corollary. It was the Polish lance that left Poland at last 
with nothing of her own to bound. 

"Dropped from her nerveless grasp the shattered spear!" 1 

What business had Sarmatia to be fighting for liberty with 
a fifteen-foot pole between her and the breasts of her enemies? 
If she had but clutched the old Roman and young American 
1 Campbell's " The Pleasures of Hope." 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 583 

weapon, and come to close quarters, there might have been a 
chance for her; but it would have spoiled the best passage in 
"The Pleasures of Hope." 

— Self-made men? — Well, yes. Of course everybody likes 
and respects self-made men. It is a great deal better to be made 
in that way than not to be made at all. Are any of you younger 
people old enough to remember that Irishman's house on the 
marsh at Cambridgeport, which house he built from drain to 
chimney-top with his own hands? It took him a good many 
years to build it, and one could see that it was a little out of 
plumb, and a little wavy in outline, and a little queer and un- 
certain in general aspect. A regular hand could certainly have 
built a better house; but it was a very good house for a "self- 
made" carpenter's house, and people praised it, and said how 
remarkably well the Irishman had succeeded. They never 
thought of praising the fine blocks of houses a little farther on. 

Your self-made man, whittled into shape with his own jack- 
knife, deserves more credit, if that is all, than the 'regular 
engine-turned article, shaped by the most approved pattern, 
and French-polished by society and travel. But as to saying 
that one is every way the equal of the other, that is another 
matter. The right of strict social discrimination of all things 
and persons, according to their merits, native or acquired, is 
one of the most precious republican privileges. I take the lib- 
erty to exercise it when I say that, other things being equal, in 
most relations of life I prefer a man of family. 

What do I mean by a man of family? — O, I '11 give you a 
general idea of what I mean. Let us give him a first-rate fit 
out; it costs us nothing. 

Four or five generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen; 
among them a member of his Majesty's Council for the Prov- 
ince, a Governor or so, one or two Doctors of Divinity, a 
member of Congress, not later than the time of long boots with 
tassels. 

Family portraits. 1 The member of the Council, by Smibert. 

1 The full-length pictures by Copley I was thinking of are such as may be seen 
in the Memorial Hall of Harvard University, but many are to be met with in 
different parts of New England, sometimes in the possession of the poor descend- 
ants of the rich gentlefolks in lace ruffles and glistening satins, grandees and 
grand dames of the ante-Revolutionary period. I remember one poor old gentle- 
man who had nothing left of his family possessions but the full-length portraits 



584 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

The great merchant-uncle, by Copley, full length, sitting in his 
arm-chair, in a velvet cap and flowered robe, with a globe by 
him, to show the range of his commercial transactions, and let- 
ters with large red seals lying round, one directed conspicuously 
to The Honorable, etc., etc. Great-grandmother, by the same 
artist; brown satin, lace very fine, hands superlative; grand old 
lady, stifnsh, but imposing. Her mother, artist unknown; flat, 
angular, hanging sleeves; parrot on fist. A pair of Stuarts, 
viz., 1. A superb, full-blown, mediaeval gentleman, with a fiery 
dash of Tory blood in his veins, tempered down with that of a 
fine old rebel grandmother, and warmed up with the best of old 
India Madeira; his face is one flame of ruddy sunshine; his 
ruffled shirt rushes out of his bosom with an impetuous gener- 
osity, as if it would drag his heart after it; and his smile is good 
for twenty thousand dollars to the Hospital, besides ample 
bequests to all relatives and dependants. 2. Lady of the same; 
remarkable cap; high waist, as in time of Empire; bust a la 
Josephine; wisps of curls, like celery- tips, at sides of forehead; 
complexion clear and warm, like rose-cordial. As for the minia- 
tures by Malbone, we don't count them in the gallery. 

Books, too, with the names of old college-students in them, 
— family names; — you will find them at the head of their 
respective classes in the days when students took rank on the 

of his ancestors, the Counsellor and his lady, saying, with a gleam of the pleas- 
antry which had come down from the days of Mather Byles, and "Balch the 
Hatter," and Sigourney, that he fared not so badly after all, for he had a pair of 
canvas-backs every day through the whole year. 

The mention of these names, all of which are mere traditions to myself and 
my contemporaries, reminds me of the long succession of wits and humorists 
whose companionship has been the delight of their generation, and who leave 
nothing on record by which they will be remembered ; Yoricks who set the tabl 
in a roar, story-tellers who gave us scenes of life in monologue better than the 
stilted presentments of the stage, and those always welcome friends with social 
interior furnishings, whose smile provoked the wit of others and whose rich, 
musical laughter was its abundant reward. Who among us in my earlier days 
ever told a story or carolled a rippling chanson so gayly, so easily, so charmingly 
as John Sullivan, whose memory is like the breath of a long bygone summer? 
Mr. Arthur Oilman has left his monument in the stately structures he planned; 
Mr. James T. Fields in the pleasant volumes full of precious recollections; but 
twenty or thirty years from now old men will tell their boys that the Yankee 
story-teller died with the first, and that the chief of our literary reminiscents, 
whose ideal portrait gallery reached from Wordsworth to Swinburne, left us 
when the second bowed his head and "fell on sleep," no longer to delight the 
guests whom his hospitality gathered around him with the pictures to which 
his lips gave life and action. [Author's note.] . 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 585 

catalogue from their parents' condition. Elzevirs, with the 
Latinized appellations of youthful progenitors, and Hie liber 
est meus 1 on the title-page. A set of Hogarth's original plates. 
Pope, original edition, 15 volumes, London, 171 7. Barrow on 
the lower shelves, in folio. Tillotson on the upper, in a little 
dark platoon of octo-decimos. 

Some family silver; a string of wedding and funeral rings; 
the arms of the family curiously blazoned; the same in worsted, 
by a maiden aunt. 

If the man of family has an old place to keep these things in, 
furnished with claw-footed chairs and black mahogany tables, 
and tall bevel-edged mirrors, and stately upright cabinets, his 
outfit is complete. 

No, my friends, I go (always, other things being equal) for 
the man who inherits family traditions and the cumulative 
humanities of at least four or five generations. Above all 
things, as a child, he should have tumbled about in a library. 
All men are afraid of books, who have not handled them from 
infancy. Do you suppose our dear didascalos 2 over there ever 
read Poll Synopsis, or consulted Castelli Lexicon, while he was 
growing up to their stature? Not he; but virtue passed through 
the hem of their parchment and leather garments whenever he 
touched them, as the precious drugs sweated through the bat's 
handle in the Arabian story. I tell you he is at home wherever 
he smells the invigorating fragrance of Russia leather. No self- 
made man feels so. One may, it is true, have all the antecedents 
I have spoken of, and yet be a boor or a shabby fellow. One may 
have none of them, and yet be fit for councils and courts. Then 
let them change places. Our social arrangement has this great 
beauty, that its strata shift up and down as they change specific 
gravity, without being clogged by layers of prescription. But I 
still insist on my democratic liberty of choice, and I go for the 
man with the gallery of family portraits against the one with 

1 " This book is mine." 

2 "Our dear didascalos" was meant for Professor James Russell Lowell, now 
Minister to England. It requires the union of exceptional native gifts and gen- 
erations of training to bring the "natural man" of New England to the complete- 
ness of scholarly manhood, such as that which adds new distinction to the name 
he bears, already remarkable for its successive generations of eminent citizens. 

"Self-made" is imperfectly made, or education is a superfluity and a failure. 
[Author's note.] Didascalos means " teacher," 



586 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

the twenty-five-cent daguerreotype, unless I find out that the 
last is the better of the two. 

— I should have felt more nervous about the late comet, 
if I had thought the world was ripe. But it is very green yet, if 
I am not mistaken ; and besides, there is a great deal of coal to 
use up, which I cannot bring myself to think was made for 
nothing. If certain things, which seem to me essential to a 
millennium, had come to pass, I should have been frightened; 
but they have n't. Perhaps you would like to hear my 

LATTER-DAY WARNINGS 

When legislators keep the law, 

When banks dispense with bolts and locks, 

When berries, whortle — rasp — and straw — 
Grow bigger downwards through the box, — 

When he that selleth house or land 

Shows leak in roof or flaw in right, — 
When haberdashers choose the stand 

Whose window hath the broadest light, — 

When preachers tell us all they think, 

And party leaders all they mean, — 
When what we pay for, that we drink, 

From real grape and coffee-bean, — 

When lawyers take what they would give, 
And doctors give what they would take, — 

When city fathers eat to live, 
Save when they fast for conscience' sake, — 

When one that hath a horse on sale 

Shall bring his merit to the proof, 
Without a lie for every nail 

That holds the iron on the hoof, — 

When in the usual place for rips 
Our gloves are stitched with special care, 

And guarded well the whalebone tips 
Where first umbrellas need repair, — 

When Cuba's weeds have quite forgot 

The power of suction to resist, 
And claret-bottles harbor not 

Such dimples as would hold your fist, — 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 587 

When publishers no longer steal, 
And pay for what they stole before, — 

When the first locomotive's wheel 
Rolls through the Hoosac tunnel's bore; — 1 

Till then let Cumming blaze away, 
And Miller's saints blow up the globe; 

But when you see that blessed day, 
Then order your ascension robe! 

The company seemed to like the verses, and I promised them 
to read others occasionally, if they had a mind to hear them. 
Of course they would not expect it every morning. Neither 
must the reader suppose that all these things I have reported 
were said at any one breakfast-time. I have not taken the 
trouble to date them, as Raspail, pere, used to date every proof 
he sent to the printer; but they were scattered over several 
breakfasts; and I have said a good many more things since, 
which I shall very possibly print some time or other, if I am 
urged to do it by judicious friends. 

I finished off with reading some verses of my friend the 
Professor, of whom you may perhaps hear more by and by. 
The Professor read them, he told me, at a farewell meeting, 
where the youngest of our great historians 2 met a few of his 
many friends at their invitation. 

Yes, we knew we must lose him, — though friendship may claim 
To blend her green leaves with the laurels of fame; . 
Though fondly, at parting, we call him our own, 
'T is the whisper of love when the bugle has blown. 

As the rider who rests with the spur on his heel, — 
As the guardsman who sleeps in his corselet of steel, — 
As the archer who stands with his shaft on the string, 
He stoops from his toil to the garland we bring. 

1 This hoped for, but almost despaired of, event, occurred on the 9th of Feb- 
ruary, 1875. The writer of the above lines was as much pleased as his fellow- 
citizens at the termination of an enterprise which gave constant occasion for 
the most inveterate pun on record. When the other conditions referred to are as 
happily fulfilled as this has been, he will still say as before, that it is time for the 
ascension garment to be ordered. [Author's note.] 

2 "The youngest of our great historians," referred to in the poem, was John 
Lothrop Motley. His career of authorship was as successful as it was noble, and 
his works are among the chief ornaments of our national literature. Are Repub- 
lics still ungrateful, as of old? [Author's note.] 



588 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

What pictures yet slumber unborn in his loom 

Till their warriors shall breathe and their beauties shall bloom, 

While the tapestry lengthens the life-glowing dyes 

That caught from our sunsets the stain of their skies! 

In the alcoves of death, in the charnels of time, 
Where flit the gaunt spectres of passion and crime, 
There are triumphs untold, there are martyrs unsung, 
There are heroes yet silent to speak with his tongue! 

Let us hear the proud story which time has bequeathed 
From lips that are warm with the freedom they breathed! 
Let him summon its tyrants, and tell us their doom, 
Though he sweep the black past like Van Tromp with his broom! 

The dream flashes by, for the west-winds awake 
On pampas, on prairie, o'er mountain and lake, 
To bathe the swift bark, like a sea-girdled shrine, 
With incense they stole from the rose and the pine. 

So fill a bright cup with the sunlight that gushed 
When the dead summer's jewels were trampled and crushed: 
The True Knight of Learning, — the world holds him dear, — 
Love bless him, Joy crown him, God speed his career! 



II 

I really believe some people save their bright thoughts as 
being too precious for conversation. What do you think an 
admiring friend said the other day to one that was talking 
good things, — good enough to print? "Why," said he, "you 
are wasting merchantable literature, a cash article, at the rate, 
as nearly as I can tell, of fifty dollars an hour." The talker took 
him to the window and asked him to look out and tell what he 
saw. 

"Nothing but a very dusty street," he said, "and a man 
driving a sprinkling-machine through it." 

"Why don't you tell the man he is wasting that water? What 
would be the state of the highways of life, if we did not drive 
our thought-sprinklers through them with the valves open, 
sometimes? 

"Besides, there is another thing about this talking, which 
you forget. It shapes our thoughts for us; — the waves of con- 
versation roll them as the surf rolls the pebbles on the shore. 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 589 

Let me modify the image a little. I rough out my thoughts in 
talk as an artist models in clay. Spoken language is so plastic, 
— you can pat and coax, and spread and shave, and rub out, 
and fill up, and stick on so easily, when you work that soft 
material, that there is nothing like it for modelling. Out of it 
come the shapes which you turn into marble or bronze in your 
immortal books, if you happen to write such. Or, to use an- 
other illustration, writing or printing is like shooting with a 
rifle; you may hit your reader's mind, or miss it; — but talk- 
ing is like playing at a mark with the pipe of an engine; if it 
is within reach, and you have time enough, you can't help 
hitting it." 

The company agreed that this last illustration was of supe- 
rior excellence, or, in the phrase used by them, "Fust-rate." 
I acknowledged the compliment, but gently rebuked the ex- 
pression. "Fust-rate," "prime," "a prime article," "a superior 
piece of goods," "a handsome garment," "a gent in a flowered 
vest," — all such expressions are final. They blast the lineage 
of him or her who utters them, for generations up and down. 
There is one other phrase which will soon come to be decisive 
of a man's social status, if it is not already. "That tells the 
whole story." It is an expression which vulgar and conceited 
people particularly affect, and which well-meaning ones, who 
know better, catch from them. It is intended to stop all debate, 
like the previous question in the General Court. Only it does 
n't; simply because "that" does not usually tell the whole, nor 
one half of the whole story. 

— It is an odd idea, that almost all our people have had a 
professional education. To become a doctor a man must study 
some three years and hear a thousand lectures, more or less. 
Just how much study it takes to make a lawyer I cannot say, 
but probably not more than this. Now, most decent people 
hear one hundred lectures or sermons (discourses) on theology 
every year, — and this, twenty, thirty, fifty years together. 
They read a great many religious books besides. The clergy, 
however, rarely hear any sermons except what they preach 
themselves. A dull preacher might be conceived, therefore, to 
lapse into a state of quasi heathenism, simply for want of reli- 
gious instruction. And, on the other hand, an attentive and 
intelligent hearer, listening to a succession of wise teachers, 



5QO OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

might become actually better educated in theology than any 
one of them. We are all theological students, and more of us 
qualified as doctors of divinity than have received degrees at 
any of the universities. 

It is not strange, therefore, that very good people should 
often find it difficult, if not impossible, to keep their attention 
fixed upon a sermon treating feebly a subject which they have 
thought vigorously about for years, and heard able men discuss 
scores of times. I have often noticed, however, that a hope- 
lessly dull discourse acts inductively, as electricians would say, 
in developing strong mental currents. I am ashamed to think 
with what accompaniments and variations and flourishes I 
have sometimes followed the droning of a heavy speaker, — 
not willingly, — for my habit is reverential, — but as a neces- 
sary result of a slight continuous impression on the senses and 
the mind, which kept both in action without furnishing the 
food they required to work upon. If you ever saw a crow with 
a king-bird after him, you will get an image of a dull speaker 
and a lively listener. The bird in sable plumage flaps heavily 
along his straightforward course, while the other sails round 
him, over, him, under him, leaves him, comes back again, 
tweaks out a black feather, shoots away once more, never los- 
ing sight of him, and finally reaches the crow's perch at the 
same time the crow does, having cut a perfect labyrinth of 
loops and knots and spirals while the slow fowl was painfully 
working from one end of his straight line to the other. 

[I think these remarks were received rather coolly. A tem- 
porary boarder from the country, consisting of a somewhat 
more than middle-aged female, with a parchment forehead and 
a dry little "frisette" shingling it, a sallow neck with a neck- 
lace of gold beads, a black dress too rusty for recent grief, and 
contours in basso-rilievo, left the table prematurely, and was 
reported to have been very virulent about what I said. So I 
went to my good old minister, and repeated the remarks, as 
nearly as I could remember them, to him. He laughed good- 
naturedly, and said there was considerable truth in them. He 
thought he could tell when people's minds were wandering, by 
their looks. In the earlier years of his ministry he had some- 
times noticed this, when he was preaching; — very little of 
late years. Sometimes, when his colleague was preaching, he 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 591 

observed this kind of inattention; but after all, it was not so 
very unnatural. I will say, by the way, that it is a rule I have 
long followed, to tell my worst thoughts to my minister, and 
my best thoughts to the young people I talk with.] 

— I want to make a literary confession now, which I believe 
nobody has made before me. You know very well that I write 
verses sometimes, because I have read some of them at this 
table. (The company assented, — two or three of them in a 
resigned sort of way, as I thought, as if they supposed I had an 
epic in my pocket, and were going to read half a dozen books or 
so for their benefit.) — I continued. Of course I write some 
lines or passages which are better than others; some which, 
compared with the others, might be called relatively excellent. 
It is in the nature of things that I should consider these rela- 
tively excellent lines or passages as absolutely good. So much 
must be pardoned to humanity. Now I never wrote a "good" 
line in my life, but the moment after it was written it seemed a 
hundred years old. Very commonly I had a sudden conviction 
that I had seen it somewhere. Possibly I may have sometimes 
unconsciously stolen it, but I do not remember that I ever once 
detected any historical truth in these sudden convictions of the 
antiquity of my new thought or phrase. I have learned utterly 
to distrust them, and never allow them to bully me out of a 
thought or line. 

This is the philosophy of it. (Here the number of the com- 
pany was diminished by a small secession.) Any new formula 
which suddenly emerges in our consciousness has its roots in 
long trains of thought; it is virtually old when it first makes its 
appearance among the recognized growths of our intellect. 
Any crystalline group of musical words has had a long and still 
period to form in. Here is one theory. 

But there is a larger law which perhaps comprehends these 
facts. It is this. The rapidity with which ideas grow old in our 
memories is in a direct ratio to the squares of their importance. 
Their apparent age runs up miraculously, like the value of dia- 
monds, as they increase in magnitude. A great calamity, for 
instance, is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened. 
It stains backward through all the leaves we have turned over 
in the book of life, before its blot of tears or of blood is dry on 
the page we are turning. For this we seem to have lived; it was 



592 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

foreshadowed in dreams that we leaped out of in the cold sweat 
of terror; in the "dissolving views" of dark day- visions; all 
omens pointed to it; all paths led to it. After the tossing half- 
forgetfulness of the first sleep that follows such an event, it 
comes upon us afresh, as a surprise, at waking; in a few mo- 
ments it is old again, — old as eternity. 

[I wish I had not said all this then and there. I might have 
known better. The pale schoolmistress, in her mourning dress, 
was looking at me, as I noticed, with a wild sort of expression. 
All at once the blood dropped out of her cheeks as the mercury 
drops from a broken barometer-tube, and she melted away from 
her seat like an image of snow; a slung-shot could not have 
brought her down better. God forgive me ! 

After this little episode, I continued, to some few who re- 
mained balancing teaspoons on the edges of cups, twirling 
knives, or tilting upon the hind legs of their chairs until their 
heads reached the wall, where they left gratuitous advertise- 
ments of various popular cosmetics.] 

When a person is suddenly thrust into any strange, new posi- 
tion of trial, he finds the place fits him as if he had been meas- 
ured for it. He has committed a great crime, for instance, and 
is sent to the State Prison. The traditions, prescriptions, limi- 
tations, privileges, all the sharp conditions of his new life, stamp 
themselves upon his consciousness as the signet on soft wax; 
— a single pressure is enough. Let me strengthen the image 
a little. Did you ever happen to see that most soft-spoken and 
velvet-handed steam-engine at the Mint? The smooth piston 
slides backward and forward as a lady might slip her delicate 
finger in and out of a ring. The engine lays one of its fingers 
calmly, but firmly, upon a bit of metal; it is a coin now, and 
will remember that touch, and tell a new race about it, when 
the date upon it is crusted over with twenty centuries. So it is 
that a great silent-moving misery puts a new stamp on us in an 
hour or a moment, — as sharp an impression as if it had taken 
half a lifetime to engrave it. 

It is awful to be in the hands of the wholesale professional 
dealers in misfortune; undertakers and jailers magnetize you 
in a moment, and you pass out of the individual life you were 
living into the rhythmical movements of their horrible machin- 
ery. Do the worst thing you can, or suffer the worst that can 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 593 

be thought of, you find yourself in a category of humanity that 
stretches back as far as Cain, and with an expert at your elbow 
who has studied your case all out beforehand, and is waiting 
for you with his implements of hemp or mahogany. I believe, 
if a man were to be burned in any of our cities to-morrow for 
heresy, there would be found a master of ceremonies who knew 
just how many fagots were necessary, and the best way of 
arranging the whole matter. 1 

— So we have not won the Goodwood cup; au contraire, we 
were a "bad fifth," if not worse than that; and trying it again, 
and the third time, has not yet bettered the matter. Now I am 
as patriotic as any of my fellow-citizens, — too patriotic in 
fact, for I have got into hot water by loving too much of my 
country ; in short, if any man, whose fighting weight is not more 
than eight stone four pounds, disputes it, I am ready to discuss 
the point with him. I should have gloried to see the stars and 
stripes in front at the finish. I love my country and I love 
horses. Stubbs's old mezzotint of Eclipse hangs over my desk, 
and Herring's portrait of Plenipotentiary — whom I saw run 
at Epsom — over my fireplace. Did I not elope from school to 
see Revenge, and Prospect, and Little John, and Peacemaker 
run over the race-course where now yon suburban village flour- 
ishes, in the year eighteen hundred and ever-so-few? Though I 
never owned a horse, have I not been the proprietor of six 
equine females, of which one was the prettiest little "Morgin" 
that ever stepped? Listen, then, to an opinion I have often 
expressed long before this venture of ours in England. Horse- 
racing is not a republican institution; horse-trotting is. Only 
very rich persons can keep race-horses, and everybody knows 

1 Accidents are liable to happen if no thoroughly trained expert happens to be 
present. When Catharine Hays was burnt at Tyburn, in 1726, the officiating 
artist scorched his own hands, and the whole business was awkwardly managed 
for want of practical familiarity with the process. We have still remaining a 
guide to direct us in one important part of the arrangements. Bishop Hooper 
was burned at Gloucester, England, in the year 1555. A few years ago, in making 
certain excavations, the charred stump of the stake to which he was bound was 
discovered. An account of the interesting ceremony, so important in ecclesi- 
astical history — the argumentwn ad ignem, with a photograph of the half- 
burned stick of timber was sent me by my friend, Mr. John Bellows, of Glouces- 
ter, a zealous antiquarian, widely known by his wonderful miniature French 
dictionary, one of the scholarly printers and publishers who honor the calling of 
Aldus and the Elzevirs. The stake was big enough to chain the whole Bench of 
Bishops to as fast as the Athanasian creed holds them. [Author's note.] 



594 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

they are kept mainly as gambling implements. All that matter 
about blood and speed we won't discuss; we understand all 
that; useful, very, — of course, — great obligations to 'the 
Godolphin "Arabian," and the rest. I say racing-horses are 
essentially gambling implements, as much as roulette tables. 
Now, I am not preaching at this moment; I may read you one 
of my sermons some other morning; but I maintain that gam- 
bling, on the great scale, is not republican. It belongs to two 
phases of society, — a cankered over-civilization, such as ex- 
ists in rich aristocracies, and the reckless life of borderers and 
adventurers, or the semi-barbarism of a civilization resolved 
into its primitive elements. Real Republicanism is stern and 
severe; its essence is not in forms of government, but in the 
omnipotence of public opinion which grows out of it. This 
public opinion cannot prevent gambling with dice or stocks, 
but it can and does compel it to keep comparatively quiet. But 
horse-racing is the most public way of gambling, and with all 
its immense attractions to the sense and the feelings, — to 
which I plead very susceptible, — the disguise is too thin that 
covers it, and everybody knows what it means. Its supporters 
are the Southern gentry, — fine fellows, no doubt, but not 
republicans exactly, as we understand the term, — a few 
Northern millionnaires more or less thoroughly millioned, who 
do not represent the real people, and the mob of sporting men, 
the best of whom are commonly idlers, and the worst very bad 
neighbors to have near one in a crowd, or to meet in a dark 
alley. In England, on the other hand, with its aristocratic insti- 
tutions, racing is a natural growth enough; the passion for it 
spreads downwards through all classes, from the Queen to the 
costermonger. London is like a shelled corn-cob on the Derby 
day, and there is not a clerk who could raise the money to hire 
a saddle with an old hack under it that can sit down on his 
ofiice-stool the next day without wincing. 

Now just compare the racer with the trotter for a moment. 
The racer is incidentally useful, but essentially something to 
bet upon, as much as the thimble-rigger's "little joker." The 
trotter is essentially and daily useful, and only incidentally a 
tool for sporting men. 

What better reason do you want for the fact that the racer is 
most cultivated and reaches his greatest perfection in England, 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 595 

and that the trotting horses of America beat the world? And 
why should we have expected that the pick — if it was the pick 

— of our few and far-between racing stables should beat the 
pick of England and France? Throw over the fallacious time- 
test, and there was nothing to show for it but a natural kind 
of patriotic feeling, which we all have, with a thoroughly pro- 
vincial conceit, which some of us must plead guilty to. 

We may beat yet. 1 As an American, I hope we shall. As a 
moralist and occasional sermonizer, I am not so anxious about 
it. Wherever the trotting horse goes, he carries in his train brisk 
omnibuses, lively bakers' carts, and therefore hot rolls, the jolly 
butcher's wagon, the cheerful gig, the wholesome afternoon 
drive with wife and child, — all the forms of moral excellence, 
except truth, which does not agree with any kind of horse-flesh. 
The racer brings with him gambling, cursing, swearing, drink- 
ing, and a distaste for mob-caps and the middle-aged virtues. 

And by the way, let me beg you not to call a trotting match 
a race, and not to speak of a "thoroughbred" as a "blooded" 
horse, unless he has been recently phlebotomized. I consent to 
your saying "blood horse," if you like. Also, if, next year, we 
send out Posterior and Posterioress, the winners of the great 
national four-mile race in 7 :i8^, and they happen to get beaten, 
pay your bets, and behave like men and gentlemen about it, 
if you know how. 

[I felt a great deal better after blowing off the ill-temper con- 
densed in the above paragraph. To brag little, — to show well, 

— to crow gently, if in luck, — to pay up, to own up, and to 
shut up, if beaten, are the virtues of a sporting man, and I can't 

1 We have beaten in many races in England since this was written, and at 
last carried off the blue ribbon of the turf at Epsom. But up to the present time 
trotting matches and baseball are distinctively American, as contrasted with 
running races and cricket, which belong, as of right, to England. The wonderful 
effects of breeding and training in a particular direction are shown in the records 
of the trotting horse. In 1844 Lady Suffolk trotted a mile in 2:26^, which was, 
I think, the fastest time to that date. In 1859 Flora Temple's time at Kalamazoo 

— I remember Mr. Emerson surprised me once by correcting my error of a 
quarter of a second in mentioning it — was 2:19!. Dexter in 1867 brought the 
figure down to 2:17!. There is now a whole class of horses that can trot under 
2:20, and in 1881 Maud S. distanced all previous records with 2:io|. Many of 
our best running horses go to England. Racing in distinction from trotting, I 
think, attracts less attention in this country now than in the days of American 
Eclipse and Henry. [Author's note.] 



596 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

say that I think we have shown them in any great perfection of 
late.] 

— Apropos of horses. Do you know how important good 
jockeying is to authors? Judicious management; letting the 
public see your animal just enough, and not too much; holding 
him up hard when the market is too full of him ; letting him out 
at just the right buying intervals; always gently feeling his 
mouth; never slacking and never jerking the rein; — this is 
what I mean by jockeying. 

— When an author has a number of books out a cunning 
hand will keep them all spinning, as Signor Blitz does his dinner- 
plates; fetching each one up, as it begins to "wabble," by an 
advertisement, a puff, or a quotation. 

— Whenever the extracts from a living writer begin to mul- 
tiply fast in the papers, without obvious reason, there is a new 
book or a new edition coming. The extracts are ground-bait. 

— Literary life is full of curious phenomena. I don't know 
that there is anything more noticeable than what we may call 
conventional reputations. There is a tacit understanding in 
every community of men of letters that they will not disturb 
the popular fallacy respecting this or that electro-gilded 
celebrity. There are various reasons for this forbearance: one 
is old; one is rich; one is good-natured; one is such a favorite 
with the pit that it would not be safe to hiss him from the man- 
ager's box. The venerable augurs of the literary or scientific 
temple may smile faintly when one of the tribe is mentioned; 
but the farce is in general kept up as well as the Chinese comic 
scene of entreating and imploring a man to stay with you, with 
the implied compact between you that he shall by no means 
think of doing it. A poor wretch he must be who would wan- 
tonly sit down on one of these bandbox reputations. A Prince- 
Rupert' s-drop, which is a tear of unannealed glass, lasts indefi- 
nitely, if you keep it from meddling hands; but break its tail 
off, and it explodes and resolves itself into powder. These ce- 
lebrities I speak of are the Prince-Rupert's-drops of the learned 
and polite world. See how the papers treat them! What an 
array of pleasant kaleidoscopic phrases, which can be arranged 
in ever so many charming patterns, is at their service! How 
kind the "Critical Notices" — where small authorship comes 
to pick up chips of praise, fragrant, sugary, and sappy — always 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 597 

are to them ! Well, life would be nothing without paper-credit 
and other fictions; so let them pass current. Don't steal their 
chips; don't puncture their swimming-bladders; don't come 
down on their pasteboard boxes; don't break the ends of their 
brittle and unstable reputations, you fellows who all feel sure 
that your names will be household words a thousand years 
from now. 

"A thousand years is a good while," said the old gentleman 
who sits opposite, thoughtfully. 

— Where have I been for the last three or four days? Down 
at the Island, 1 deer-shooting. — How many did I bag? I 
brought home one buck shot. — The Island is where? No 
matter. It is the most splendid domain that any man looks 
upon in these latitudes. Blue sea around it, and running up 
into its heart, so that the little boat slumbers like a baby in 
lap, while the tall ships are stripping naked to fight the hurri- 
cane outside, and storm-stay-sails banging and flying in rib- 
bons. Trees, in stretches of miles; beeches, oaks, most numer- 
ous; — many of them hung with moss, looking like bearded 
Druids; some coiled in the clasp of huge, dark-stemmed grape- 
vines. Open patches where the sun gets in and goes to sleep, 
and the winds come so finely sifted that they are as soft as 
swan's-down. Rocks scattered about, — Stonehenge-like mono- 
liths. Fresh-water lakes; one of them, Mary's lake, crystal- 
clear, full of flashing pickerel lying under the lily-pads like 
tigers in the jungle. Six pounds of ditto killed one morning for 
breakfast. Ego fecit. 2. 

The divinity-student looked as if he would like to question 
my Latin. No sir, I said, — you need not trouble yourself. 
There is a higher law in grammar not to be put down by 
Andrews and Stoddard. Then I went on. 

Such hospitality as that island has seen there has not been 
the like of in these our New England sovereignties. There is 
nothing in the shape of kindness and courtesy that can make 
life beautiful, which has not found its home in that ocean- 

1 The beautiful island referred to is Naushon, the largest of a group lying 
between Buzzard's Bay and the Vineyard Sound, south of the main land of 
Massachusetts. It is the noblest domain in New England, and the present Lord 
of the Manor is worthy of succeeding "the Governor" of blessed memory, 
[Author's note.] 

2 (Pronounced " fake-it.") "I did it." 



598 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

principality. It has welcomed all who were worthy of welcome, 
from the pale clergyman who came to breathe the sea-air with 
its medicinal salt and iodine, to the great statesman who turned 
his back on the affairs of empire, and smoothed his Olympian 
forehead, and flashed his white teeth in merriment over the 
long table, where his wit was the keenest and his story the 
best. 

[I don't believe any man ever talked like that in this world. 
I don't believe I talked just so; but the fact is, in reporting 
one's conversation, one cannot help Blair-mg it up more or* 
less, ironing out crumpled paragraphs, starching limp ones, and 
crimping and plaiting a little sometimes; it is as natural as 
prinking at the looking-glass.] 

— How can a man help writing poetry in such a place? 
Everybody does write poetry that goes there. In the state 
archives, kept in the library of the Lord of the Isle, are whole 
volumes of unpublished verse, — some by well-known hands, 
and others quite as good, by the last people you would think 
of as versifiers, — men who could pension off all the genuine 
poets in the country, and buy ten acres of Boston common, if 
it was for sale, with what they had left. Of course I had to 
write my little copy of verses with the rest; here it is, if you 
will hear me read it. When the sun is in the west, vessels sailing 
in an easterly direction look bright or dark to one who observes 
them from the north or south, according to the tack they are 
sailing upon. Watching them from one of the windows of the 
great mansion, I saw these perpetual changes, and moralized 
thus: — 

SUN AND SHADOW 

As I look from the isle, o'er its billows of green, 

To the billows of foam-crested blue, 
Yon bark, that afar in the distance is seen, 

Half dreaming, my eyes will pursue: 
Now dark in the shadow, she scatters the spray 

As the chaff in the stroke of the flail; 
Now white as the sea-gull, she flies on her way, 

The sun gleaming bright on her sail. 

Yet her pilot is thinking of dangers to shun, — 
Of breakers that whiten and roar; 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 599 

How little he cares, if in shadow or sun 

They see him that gaze from the shore! 
He looks to the beacon that looms from the reef, 

To the rock that is under his lee, 
As he drifts on the blast, like a wind-wafted leaf, 

O'er the gulfs of the desolate sea. 

Thus drifting afar to the dim-vaulted caves 

Where life and its ventures are laid, 
The dreamers who gaze while we battle the waves 

May see us in sunshine or shade; 
Yet true to our course, though our shadow grow dark, 

We '11 trim our broad sail as before, 
And stand by the rudder that governs the bark, 

Nor ask how we look from the shore! 



— Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. 
Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and 
levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends 
to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not 
accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a 
man from going mad. We frequently see persons in insane hos- 
pitals, sent there in consequence of what are called religious 
mental disturbances. I confess that I think better of them than 
of many who hold the same notions, and keep their wits and 
appear to enjoy life very well, outside of the asylums. Any 
decent person ought to go mad, if he really holds such or such 
opinions. It is very much to his discredit in. every point of 
view, if he does not. What is the use of my saying what some 
of these opinions are? Perhaps more than one of you hold such 
as I should think ought to send you straight over to Somerville, 
if you have any logic in your heads or any human feeling in 
your hearts. Anything that is brutal, cruel, heathenish, that 
makes life hopeless for the most of mankind and perhaps for 
entire races, — anything that assumes the necessity of the 
extermination of instincts which were given to be regulated, — 
no matter by what name you call it, — no matter whether a 
fakir, or a monk, or a deacon believes it, — if received, ought 
to produce insanity in every well-regulated mind. That con- 
dition becomes a normal one, under the circumstances. I am 
very much ashamed of some people for retaining their reason, 
when they know perfectly well that if they were not the most 



600 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

stupid or the most selfish of human beings, they would become 
non-compotes at once. 

[Nobody understood this but the theological student and 
the schoolmistress. They looked intelligently at each other; 
but whether they were thinking about my paradox or not, I am 
not clear. — It would be natural enough. Stranger things have 
happened. Love and Death enter boarding-houses without 
asking the price of board, or whether there is room for them. 
Alas ! these young people are poor and pallid ! Love should be 
both rich and rosy, but must be either rich or rosy. Talk about 
military duty ! What is that to the warfare of a married maid- 
of-all-work, with the title of mistress, and an American female 
constitution, which collapses just in the middle third of life, 
and comes out vulcanized India-rubber, if it happen to live 
through the period when health and strength are most wanted?] 

— Have I ever acted in private theatricals? Often. I have 
played the part of the "Poor Gentleman," before a great many 
audiences, — more, I trust, than I shall ever face again. I did 
not wear a stage-costume, nor a wig, nor moustaches of burnt 
cork, but I was placarded and announced as a public performer, 
and at the proper hour I came forward with the ballet-dancer's 
smile upon my countenance, and made my bow and acted my 
part. I have seen my name stuck up in letters so big that I was 
ashamed to show myself in the place by daylight. I have gone 
to a town with a sober literary essay in my pocket, and seen 
myself everywhere announced as the most desperate of buffos, 
— one who was obliged to restrain himself in the full exercise 
of his powers, from prudential considerations. I have been 
through as many hardships as Ulysses, in the pursuit of my 
histrionic vocation. I have travelled in cars until the con- 
ductors all knew me like a brother. I have run off the rails, and 
stuck all night in snow-drifts, and sat behind females that 
would have the window open when one could not wink without 
his eyelids freezing together. Perhaps I shall give you some of 
my experiences one of these days ; — I will not now, for I have 
something else for you. 

Private theatricals, as I have figured in them in country 
lyceum-halls, are one thing, — - and private theatricals, as they 
may be seen in certain gilded and frescoed saloons of our 
metropolis, are another. Yes, it is pleasant to see real gentle- 



THE AL /OCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 601 

men and ladies, who do not think it necessary to mouth, and 
rant, and stride, like most of our stage heroes and heroines, in 
the characters which show off their graces and talents; most of 
all to see a fresh, unrouged, unspoiled, high-bred young maiden, 
with a lithe figure, and a pleasant voice, acting in those love- 
dramas which make us young again to look upon, when real 
youth and beauty will play them for us. 

— Of course I wrote the prologue I was asked to write. I 
did not see the play, though. I knew there was a young lady 
in it, and that somebody was in love with her, and she was in 
love with him, and somebody (an old tutor, I believe) wanted 
to interfere, and, very naturally, the young lady was too sharp 
for him. The play of course ends charmingly; there is a general 
reconciliation, and all concerned form a line and take each 
other's hands, as people always do after they have made up 
their quarrels, — and then the curtain falls, — if it does not 
stick, as it commonly does at private theatrical exhibitions, in 
which case a boy is detailed to pull it down, which he does, 
blushing violently. 

Now, then, for my prologue. I am not going to change my 
caesuras and cadences for anybody; so if you do not like the 
heroic, or iambic trimeter brachycatalectic, you had better not 
wait to hear it. 

THIS IS IT 

A Prologue? Well, of course the ladies know; — 
I have my doubts. No matter, — here we go! 
What is a prologue? Let our Tutor teach: 
Pro means beforehand; logus stands for speech. 
'T is like the harper's prelude on the strings, 
The prima donna's courtesy ere she sings. 

"The world's a stage," — as Shakespeare said, one day; 
The stage a world — was what he meant to say. 
The outside world's a blunder, that is clear; 
The real world that Nature meant is here. 
Here every foundling finds its lost mamma; 
Each rogue, repentant, melts his stern papa; 
Misers relent, the spendthrift's debts are paid, 
The cheats are taken in the traps they laid; 
One after one the troubles all are past 
Till the fifth act comes right side up at last, 



602 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

When the young couple, old folks, rogues, and all, 
Join hands, so happy at the curtain's fall. 

— Here suffering virtue ever finds relief, 

And black-browed ruffians always come to grief, 

— When the lorn damsel, with a frantic speech, 
And cheeks as hueless as a brandy-peach, 

Cries, "Help, kyind Heaven!" and drops upon her knees 
On the green — baize, — beneath the (canvas) trees, — 
See to her side avenging Valor fly: — 
"Ha! Villain! Draw! Now, Terraitorr, yield or die!" 

— When the poor hero flounders in despair, 
Some dear lost uncle turns up millionaire, — 
Clasps the young scapegrace with paternal joy, 

Sobs on his neck, "My boy! My boy!! MY BOY!!!" 

Ours, then, sweet friends, the real world to-night 
Of love that conquers in disaster's spite. 
Ladies, attend! While woful cares and doubt 
Wrong the soft passion in the world without, 
Though fortune scowl, though prudence interfere, 
One thing is certain: Love will triumph here! 

Lords of creation, whom your ladies rule, — 
' The world's great masters, when you're out of school, — 
Learn the brief moral of our evening's play: 
Man has his will, — but woman has her way! v 
While man's dull spirit toils in smoke and fire, 
Woman's swift instinct threads the electric wire, — 
The magic bracelet stretched beneath the waves 
Beats the black giant with his score of slaves. 
All earthly powers confess your sovereign art 
But that one rebel, — woman's wilful heart, 
All foes you master; but a woman's wit 
Lets daylight through you ere you know you 're hit. 
So, just to picture what her art can do, 
Hear an old story made as good as new. 

Rudolph, professor of the headsman's trade, 

Alike was famous for bis arm and blade. 

One day a prisoner Justice had to kill 

Knelt at the block to test the artist's skill. 

Bare-armed, swart-visaged, gaunt, and shaggy-browed, 

Rudolph the headsman rose above the crowd. 

His falchion lightened with a sudden gleam, 

As the pike's armor flashes in the stream. 

He sheathed his blade; he turned as if to go; 

The victim knelt, still waiting for the blow. 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 603 

"Why strikest not? Perform thy murderous act," 

The prisoner said. (His voice was slightly cracked.) 
"Friend I have struck," the artist straight replied; 
"Wait but one moment, and yourself decide." 

He held his snuff-box, — "Now then, if you please!" 
The prisoner sniffed, and, with a crashing sneeze, 
Off his head tumbled, — bowled along the floor, — 
Bounced down the steps; — the prisoner said no more! 

Woman! thy falchion is a glittering eye; 
If death lurks in it, oh, how sweet to die! 
Thou takest hearts as Rudolph took the head; 
We die with love, and never dream we're dead! 

The prologue went off very well, as I hear. No alterations 
were suggested by the lady to whom it was sent, so far as I 
know. Sometimes people criticise the poems one sends them, 
and suggest all sorts of improvements. 1 Who was that silly 
body that wanted Burns to alter "Scots wha hae," so as to 
lengthen the last line, thus? — 

"Edward!" Chains and slavery. 

Here is a little poem I sent a short time since to a committee 
for a certain celebration. I understood that it was to be a fes- 
tive and convivial occasion, and ordered myself accordingly. 
It seems the president of the day was what is called a "teeto- 
taller." I received a note from him in the following words, con- 
taining the copy subjoined, with the emendations annexed to it. 

"Dear Sir, — your poem gives good satisfaction to the com- 
mittee. The sentiments expressed with reference to liquor are 
not, however, those generally entertained by this community. 
I have therefore consulted the clergyman of this place, who has 
made some slight changes, which he thinks will remove all 
objections, and keep the valuable portions of the poem. Please 
to inform me of your charge for said poem. "Our means are 
limited, etc., etc., etc. 

"Yours with respect." 

1 I remember being asked by a celebrated man of letters to let him look over 
an early, but somewhat elaborate poem of mine. He read the manuscript and 
suggested the change of one word, which I adopted in deference to his opinion. 
The emendation was anything but an improvement, and in later editions the 
passage reads as when first written. [Author's note.] 



604 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

Here it is,— osykJctfte slight alterations. 1 

Come! £11 a fresh bumper, — for why should we go 

logwood 

While the nectar still reddens our cups as they fiowl 

i decoction 

Pour out the rich juices still .bright with the sun,, 

dye-stuff 

Till o'er the brimmed crystal the rubies shall run. 

half ripened apples 

The ^purple globed - clusters their life-dews have bled; 

taste sugar of lead 

How sweet is the breath of the fragrance they shod ! 

rant poisons wines 1 1 1 

For summer's last roses - lie hid in the wines 

stable-boys smoking long-Tiine's. 

That were garnered b ymaidens who laughed through the vinesr 

scowl howl scoff sneet 

•/Then a smile, and a glass, and a toast, and a cheer, 

strychnine and whiskey, and ratsbane and bee r 

For all the good wine, and w e 've some of it here * 
In cellar, in pantry, in attic, in hall, 

Down, down, with the tyrant that masters us all 1 

Long live the gay s e rvant that laughs for. uij-alll - 

The company said I had been shabbily treated, and advised 
me to charge the committee double, — which I did. But as I 
never got my pay, I don't know that it made much difference. 
I am a very particular person about having all I write printed 
as I write it. I require to see a proof, a revise, a re-revise, and 
a double re-revise, or fourth-proof rectified impression of all 
my productions, especially verse. A misprint kills a sensitive 
author. An intentional change of his text murders him. No 
wonder so many poets die young! 

I have nothing more to report at this time, except two pieces 
of advice I gave to the young women at table. One relates to a 
vulgarism of language, which I grieve to say is sometimes heard 
even from female lips. The other is of more serious purport, 

1 I recollect a British criticism of the poem "with the slight alterations," in 
which the writer was quite indignant at the treatment my convivial song had 
received. No committee, he thought, would dare to treat a Scotch author in that 
way. I could not help being reminded of Sydney Smith, and the surgical opera- 
tion he proposed, in order to get a pleasantry into the head of a North Briton. 
[Author's note.] 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 605 

and applies to such as contemplate a change of condition, — 
matrimony, in fact. 

— The woman who "calc'lates" is lost. 

— Put not your trust in money, but put your money in 
trust. 

Ill 

[The Atlantic obeys the moon, and its Luniversary has 
come round again. I have gathered up some hasty notes of my 
remarks made since the last high tides, which I respectfully 
submit. Please to remember this is talk; just as easy and just 
as formal as I choose to make it.] 

— I never saw an author in my life — saving, perhaps, one 
— that did not purr as audibly as a full-grown domestic cat 
(Felis Catus, Linn.) on having his fur smoothed in the right 
way by a skilful hand. 

But let me give you a caution. Be very careful how you tell 
an author he is droll. Ten to one he will hate you; and if he 
does, be sure he can do you a mischief, and very probably will. 
Say you cried over his romance or his verses, and he will love 
you and send you a copy. You can laugh over that as much as 
you like, — in private. 

— Wonder why authors and actors are ashamed of being 
funny? — Why, there are obvious reasons, and deep philo- 
sophical ones. The clown knows very well that the women are 
not in love with him, but with Hamlet, the fellow in the black 
cloak and plumed hat. Passion never laughs. The wit knows 
that his place is at the tail of a procession. 

If you want the deep underlying reason, I must take more 
time to tell it. There is a perfect consciousness in every form of 
wit, — using that term in its general sense, — that its essence 
consists in a partial and incomplete view of whatever it touches. 
It throws a single ray, separated from the rest, — red, yellow, 
blue, or any intermediate shade, — upon an object; never 
white light; that is the province of wisdom. We get beautiful 
effects from wit, — all the prismatic colors, — but never the 
object as it is in fair daylight. A pun, which is a kind of wit, 
is a different and much shallower trick in mental optics ; throw- 
ing the shadows of two objects so that one overlies the other. 
Poetry uses the rainbow tints for special effects, but always 



606 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

keeps its essential object in the purest white light of truth. — 
Will you allow me to pursue this subject a little farther? 

[They did n't allow me at that time, for somebody happened 
to scrape the floor with his chair just then ; which accidental 
sound, as all must have noticed, has the instantaneous effect 
that the cutting of the yellow hair by Iris had upon infelix 
Dido. 1 It broke the charm, and that breakfast was over.] 

— Don't flatter yourselves that friendship authorizes you 
to say disagreeable things to your intimates. On the contrary, 
the nearer you come into relation with a person, the more 
necessary do tact and courtesy become. Except in cases of 
necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant 
truths from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them. 
Good breeding never forgets that amour-propre is universal. 
When you read the story of the Archbishop and Gil Bias, you 
may laugh, if you will, at the poor old man's delusion; but don't 
forget that the youth was the greater fool of the two, and that 
his master served such a booby rightly in turning him out of 
doors. 

— You need not get up a rebellion against what I say, if you 
find everything in my sayings is not exactly new. You can't 
possibly mistake a man who means to be honest for a literary 
pickpocket. I once read an introductory lecture that looked to 
me too learned for its latitude. On examination, I found all its 
erudition was taken ready-made from Disraeli. 2 If I had been 
ill-natured, I should have shown up the little great man, who 
had once belabored me in his feeble way. But one can gener- 
ally tell these wholesale thieves easily enough, and they are not 
worth the trouble of putting them in the pillory. I doubt the 
entire novelty of my remarks just made on telling unpleasant 
truths, yet I am not conscious of any larceny. 

Neither make too much of flaws and occasional overstate- 
ments. Some persons seem to think that absolute truth, in the 
form of rigidly stated propositions, is all that conversation 
admits. This is precisely as if a musician should insist on hav- 
ing nothing but perfect chords and simple melodies, — no 
diminished fifths, no flat sevenths, no flourishes, on any ac- 
count. Now it is fair to say, that, just as music must have all 

1 The effect was Dido's death; JEneid, iv, 704-05. 

2 Isaac Disraeli, author of Curiosities of Literature. 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 607 

these, so conversation must have its partial truths, its embel- 
lished truths, its exaggerated truths. It is in its higher forms 
an artistic product, and admits the ideal element as much as 
pictures or statues. One man who is a little too literal can spoil 
the talk of a whole tableful of men of esprit. — "Yes," you 
say, "but who wants to hear fanciful people's nonsense? Put 
the facts to it, and then see where it is! " — Certainly, if a man 
is too fond of paradox, — if he is flighty and empty, — if, in- 
stead of striking those fifths and sevenths, those harmonious 
discords, often so much better than the twinned octaves, in the 
music of thought, — if, instead of striking these, he jangles the 
chords, stick a fact into him like a stiletto. But remember that 
talking is one of the fine arts, — the noblest, the most impor- 
tant, and the most difficult, — and that its fluent harmonies 
may be spoiled by the intrusion of a single harsh note. There- 
fore conversation which is suggestive rather than argumenta- 
tive, which lets out the most of each talker's results of thought, 
is commonly the pleasantest and the most profitable. It is not 
easy, at the best, for two persons talking together to make the 
most of each other's thoughts, there are so many of them. 

[The company looked as if they wanted an explanation.] 

When John and Thomas, for instance, are talking together, 
it is natural enough that among the six there should be more or 
less confusion and misapprehension. 

[Our landlady turned pale; — no doubt she thought there 
was a screw loose in my intellects, — and that involved the 
probable loss of a boarder. A severe-looking person, who wears 
a Spanish cloak and a sad cheek, fluted by the passions of the 
melodrama, whom I understand to be the professional ruffian 
of the neighboring theatre, alluded, with a certain lifting of the 
brow, drawing down of the corners of the mouth, and some- 
what rasping voce di petto, to Falstaff's nine men in buckram. 
Everybody looked up; I believe the old gentleman opposite 
was afraid I should seize the carving-knife; at any rate, he slid 
it to one side, as it were carelessly.] 

I think, I said, I can make it plain to Benjamin Franklin 
here, that there are at least six personalities distinctly to be 
recognized as taking part in that dialogue between John and 
Thomas. 



608 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

' i. The real John; known only to his Maker. 

2. John's ideal John; never the real one, and often very 
Three Johns. •{ unlike him. 

3. Thomas's ideal John; never the real John, nor John's 
John, but often very unlike either. 

(' 1 . The real Thomas. 
Three Thomases, -j 2. Thomas's ideal Thomas. 
(. 3. John's ideal Thomas. 

Only one of the three Johns is taxed ; only one can be weighed 
on a platform-balance; but the other two are just as important 
in the conversation. Let us suppose the real John to be old, 
dull, and ill-looking. But as the Higher Powers have not con- 
ferred on men the gift of seeing themselves in the true light, 
John very possibly conceives himself to be youthful, witty, and 
fascinating, and talks from the point of view of this ideal. 
Thomas, again, believes him to be an artful rogue, we will say; 
therefore he is, so far as Thomas's attitude in the conversation 
is concerned, an artful rogue, though really simple and stupid. 
The same conditions apply to the three Thomases. It follows, 
that, until a man can be found who knows himself as his Maker 
knows him, or who sees himself as others see him, there must 
be at least six persons engaged in every dialogue between two. 
Of these, the least important, philosophically speaking, is the 
one that we have called the real person. No wonder two dis- 
putants often get angry, when there are six of them talking and 
listening all at the same time. 

[A very unphilosophical application of the above remarks 
was made by a young fellow answering to the name of John, 
who sits near me at table. A certain basket of peaches, a rare 
vegetable, little known to boarding-houses, was on its way to 
me via this unlettered Johannes. He appropriated the three 
that remained in the basket, remarking that there was just one 
apiece for him. I convinced him that his practical inference 
was hasty and illogical, but in the mean time he had eaten the 
peaches.] 

— The opinions of relatives as to a man's powers are very 
commonly of little value; not merely because they sometimes 
overrate their own flesh and blood, as some may suppose; on 
the contrary, they are quite as likely to underrate those whom 
they have grown into the habit of considering like themselves. 
The advent of genius is like what florists style the breaking of a 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 609 

seedling tulip into what we may call high-caste colors, — ten 
thousand dingy flowers, then one with the divine streak; or, 
if you prefer it, like the coming up in old Jacob's garden of 
that most gentlemanly little fruit, the seckel pear, which I have 
sometimes seen in shop-windows. It is a. surprise, — there is 
nothing to account for it. All at once we find that twice two 
make five. Nature is fond of what are called "gift-enterprises." 
This little book of life which she has given into the hands of its 
joint possessors is commonly one of the old story-books bound 
over again. Only once in a great while there is a stately poem 
in it, or its leaves are illuminated with the glories of art, or they 
enfold a draft for untold values signed by the million-fold 
millionnaire old mother herself. But strangers are commonly 
the first to find the "gift" that came with the little book. 

It may be questioned whether anything can be conscious of 
its own flavor. Whether the musk-deer, or the civet-cat, or 
even a still more eloquently silent animal that might be men- 
tioned, is aware of any personal peculiarity, may well be 
doubted. No man knows his own voice; many men do not 
know their own ■ profiles. Every one remembers Carlyle's 
famous "Characteristics" article; allow for exaggerations, and 
there is a great deal in his doctrine of the self -unconsciousness 
of genius. It comes under the great law just stated. This in- 
capacity of knowing its own traits is often found in the family 
as well as in the individual. So never mind what your cousins, 
brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and the rest, say about that 
fine poem you have written, but send it (postage-paid) to the 
editors, if there are any, of the Atlantic, — which, by the way, 
is not so called because it is a a notion, as some dull wits wish 
they had said, but are too late. 

— Scientific knowledge, even in the most modest persons, 
has mingled with it a something which partakes of insolence. 
Absolute, peremptory facts are bullies, and those who keep 
company with them are apt to get a bullying habit of mind; — 
not of manners, perhaps; they may be soft, and smooth, but the 
smile they carry has a quiet assertion in it, such as the Cham- 
pion of the Heavy Weights, commonly the best-natured, but 
not the most diffident of men, wears upon what he very inele- 
gantly calls his "mug." Take the man, for instance, who deals 
in the mathematical sciences. There is no elasticity in a mathe- 



610 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

matical fact; if you bring up against it, it never yields a hair's 
breadth; everything must go to pieces that comes in collision 
with it. What the mathematician knows being absolute, un- 
conditional, incapable of suffering question, it should tend, in 
the nature of things, to breed a despotic way of thinking. So 
of those who deal with the palpable and often unmistakable 
facts of external nature; only in a less degree. Every prob- 
ability — and most of our common, working beliefs are prob- 
abilities — is provided with buffers at both ends, which break 
the force of opposite opinions clashing against it; but scientific 
certainty has no spring in it, no courtesy, no possibility of 
yielding. All this must react on the minds which handle these 
forms of truth. 

— Oh, you need not tell me that Messrs. A. and B. are the 
most gracious, unassuming people in the world, and yet pre- 
eminent in the ranges of science I am referring to. I know that 
as well as you. But mark this which I am going to say once for 
all: If I had not force enough to project a principle full in the 
face of the half dozen most obvious facts which seem to contra- 
dict it, I would think only in single file from this day forward. 
A rash man, once visiting a certain noted institution at South 
Boston, ventured to express the sentiment, that man is a ra- 
tional being. An old woman who was an attendant in the Idiot 
school contradicted the statement, and appealed to the facts 
before the speaker to disprove it. The rash man stuck to his 
hasty generalization, notwithstanding. 

[ — It is my desire to be useful to those with whom I am asso- 
ciated in my daily relations. I not unfrequently practise the 
divine art of music in company with our landlady's daughter, 
who, as I mentioned before, is the owner of an accordion. 
Having myself a well-marked barytone voice of more than half 
an octave in compass, I sometimes add my vocal powers to her 
execution of 

"Thou, thou reign'st in this bosom," 

not, however, unless her mother or some other discreet female 
is present, to prevent misinterpretation or remark. I have also 
taken a good deal of interest in Benjamin Franklin, before re- 
ferred to, sometimes called B. F., or more frequently Frank, 
in imitation of that felicitous abbreviation, combining dignity. 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 611 

and convenience, adopted by some of his betters. My acquaint- 
ance with the French language is very imperfect, I having 
never studied it anywhere but in Paris, which is awkward, as 
B. F. devotes himself to it with the peculiar advantage of an 
Alsacian teacher. The boy, I think, is doing well, between us, 
notwithstanding. The following is an uncorrected French exer- 
cise, written by this young gentleman. His mother thinks it 
very creditable to his abilities; though, being unacquainted 
with the French language, her judgment cannot be considered 
final. 

LE RAT DES SALONS A LECTURE 

Ce rat g i est un animal fort singulier. II a deux pattes de derriere 
sur lesquelles il marche, et deux pattes de devant dont il fait usage 
pour tenir les journaux. Cet animal a la peau noire pour le plupart, 
et porte un cercle blanchatre autour de son cou. On le trouve tous 
les jours aux dits salons, ou il demeure, digere, s'il y a de quoi dans 
son interieur, respire, tousse, eternue, dort, et ronfle quelquefois, 
ayant toujours le semblant de lire. On ne sait pas s'il a une autre 
gite que cela. II a l'air d'une bete tres stupide, mais il est d'une 
sagacite et d'une vitesse extraordinaire quand il s'agit de saisir un 
journal nouveau. On ne sait pas pourquoi il lit, parcequ'il ne parait 
pas avoir des idees. II vocalise rarement, mais en revanche, il fait 
des bruits nasaux divers. II porte un crayon dans une de ses poches 
pectorales, avec lequel il fait des marques sur les bords des jour- 
naux et des livres, semblable aux suivans: ! ! ! — Bah! Pooh! II ne 
faut pas cependant les prendre pour des signes d'intelligence. II ne 
vole pas, ordinairement; il fait rarement meme des echanges de 
parapluie, et jamais de chapeau, parceque son chapeau a toujours 
un caractere specifique. On ne sait pas au juste ce dont il se nourrit. 
Feu Cuvier etait d'avis que c'etait de l'odeur du cuir des reliures; 
ce qu'on dit d'etre une nourriture animale fort saine, et peu chere. 
II vit bien longtems. Enfin il meure, en laissant a ses heritiers une 
carte du Salon a Lecture ou il avait existe pendant sa vie. On pre- 
tend qu'il revient toutes les nuits, apres la mort, visiter le Salon. 
On peut le voir, dit on, a minuit, dans sa place habituelle, tenant le 
journal du soir, et ayant a sa main un crayon de charbon. Le lende- 
main on trouve des caracteres inconnus sur les bords du journal. 
Ce qui prouve que le spiritualisme est vrai, et que Messieurs les 
Prof esseurs de Cambridge sont des imbeciles qui ne savent rien du 
tout, du tout. 

I think this exercise, which I have not corrected, or allowed 



612 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

to be touched in any way, is not discreditable to B. F. You 
observe that he is acquiring a knowledge of zoology at the same 
time that he is learning French. Fathers of families in moderate 
circumstances will find it profitable to their children, and an 
economical mode of instruction, to set them to revising and 
amending this boy's exercise. The passage was originally taken 
from the "Histoire Naturelle des Betes Ruminans et Rongeurs, 
Bipedes et Autres," lately published in Paris. This was trans- 
lated into English and published in London. It was republished 
at Great Pedlington, with notes and additions by the American 
editor. The notes consist of an interrogation-mark on page 53d, 
and a reference (p. 127th) to another book "edited" by the 
same hand. The additions consist of the editor's name on the 
title-page and back, with a complete and authentic list of said 
editor's honorary titles in the first of these localities. Our boy 
translated the translation back into French. This may be com- 
pared with the original, to be found on Shelf 13, Division X, 
of the Public Library of this metropolis.] 

— Some of you boarders ask me from time to time why I 
don't write a story, or a novel, or something of that kind. In- 
stead of answering each one of you separately, I will thank you 
to step up into the wholesale department for a few moments, 
where I deal in answers by the piece and by the bale. 

That every articulately-speaking human being has in him 
stuff for one novel in three volumes duodecimo has long been 
with me a cherished belief. It has been maintained, on the 
other hand, that many persons cannot write more than one 
novel, — that all after that are likely to be failures. — Life is so 
much more tremendous a thing in its heights and depths than 
any transcript of it can be, that all records of human experience 
are as so many bound herbaria to the innumerable glowing, 
glistening, rustling, breathing, fragrance-laden, poison-sucking, 
life-giving, death-distilling leaves and flowers of the forest and 
the prairies. All we can do with books of human experience is 
to make them alive again with something borrowed from our 
own lives. We can make a book alive for us just in proportion 
to its resemblance in essence or in form to our own experience. 
Now an author's first novel is naturally drawn, to a great ex- 
tent, from his personal experiences; that is, is a literal copy of 
nature under various slight disguises. But the moment the 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 613 

author gets out of his personality, he must have the creative 
power, as well as the narrative art and the sentiment, in order 
to tell a living story; and this is rare. 

Besides, there is great danger that a man's first life-story 
shall clean him out, so to speak, of his best thoughts. Most 
lives, though their stream is loaded with sand and turbid with 
alluvial waste, drop a few golden grains of wisdom as they flow 
along. Oftentimes a single cradling gets them all, and after 
that the poor man's labor is only rewarded by mud and worn 
pebbles. All which proves that I, as an individual of the human 
family, could write one novel or story at any rate, if I would. 

— Why don't I, then? — Well, there are several reasons 
against it. In the first place, I should tell all my secrets, and I 
maintain that verse is the proper medium for such revelations. 
Rhythm and rhyme and the harmonies of musical language, 
the play of fancy, the fire of imagination, the flashes of passion, 
so hide the nakedness of a heart laid open, that hardly any 
confession, transfigured in the luminous halo of poetry, is re- 
proached as self -exposure. A beauty shows herself under the 
chandeliers, protected by the glitter of her diamonds, with such 
a broad snow-drift of white arms and shoulders laid bare, that, 
were she unadorned and in plain calico, she would be unendur- 
able — in the opinion of the ladies. 

Again, I am terribly afraid I should show up all my friends. 
I should like to know if all story-tellers do not do this? Now I 
am afraid all my friends would not bear showing up very well; 
for they have an average share of the common weakness of 
humanity, which I am pretty certain would come out. Of all 
that have told stories among us there is hardly one I can recall 
who has not drawn too faithfully some living portrait which 
might better have been spared. 

Once more, I have sometimes thought it possible I might be 
too dull to write such a story as I should wish to write. 

And finally, I think it very likely I shall write a story one of 
these days. Don't be surprised at any time, if you see me com- 
ing out with "The Schoolmistress," or "The Old Gentleman 
Opposite." [Our schoolmistress and our old gentleman that 
sits opposite had left the table before I said this.] I want my 
glory for writing the same discounted now, on the spot, if 
you please. I will write when I get ready. How many people 



614 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

live on the reputation of the reputation they might have 
made! 

— I saw you smiled when I spoke about the possibility of my 
being too dull to write a good story. I don't pretend to know 
what you meant by it, but I take occasion to make a remark 
which may hereafter prove of value to some among you. — 
When one of us who has been led by native vanity or senseless 
flattery to think himself or herself possessed of talent arrives 
at the full and final conclusion that he or she is really dull, it is 
one of the most tranquillizing and blessed convictions that can 
enter a mortal's mind. All our failures, our short-comings, our 
strange disappointments in the effect of our efforts are lifted 
from our bruised shoulders, and fall, like Christian's pack, at 
the feet of that Omnipotence which has seen fit to deny us the 
pleasant gift of high intelligence, — with which one look may 
overflow us in some wider sphere of being. 

— How sweetly and honestly one said to me the other day, 
"I hate books!" A gentleman, — singularly free from affecta- 
tions, — not learned, of course, but of perfect breeding, which 
is often so much better than learning, — by no means dull, in 
the sense of knowledge of the world and society, but certainly 
not clever either in the arts or sciences, — his company is 
pleasing to all who know him. I did not recognize in him in- 
feriority of literary taste half so distinctly as I did simplicity of 
character and fearless acknowledgment of his inaptitude for 
scholarship. In fact, I think there are a great many gentlemen 
and others, who read with a mark to keep their place, that 
really "hate books," but never had the wit to find it out, or 
the manliness to own it. [Entre nous, I always read with a 
mark.] 

We get into a way of thinking as if what we call an "intel- 
lectual man" was, as a matter of course, made up of nine tenths, 
or thereabouts, of book-learning, and one tenth himself. But 
even if he is actually so compounded, he need not read much. 
Society is a strong solution of books. It draws the virtue out of 
what is best worth reading, as hot water draws the strength of 
tea-leaves. If I were a prince, I would hire or buy a private 
literary tea-pot, in which I would steep all the leaves of new 
books that promised well. The infusion would do for me with- 
out the vegetable fibre. You understand me; I would have a 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 615 

person whose sole business should be to read day and night, and 
talk to me whenever I wanted him to. I know the man I would 
have: a quick-witted, out-spoken, incisive fellow; knows his- 
tory, or at any rate has a shelf full of books about it, which he 
can use handily, and the same of all useful arts and sciences; 
knows all the common plots of plays and novels, and the stock 
company of characters that are continually coming on in new 
costume; can give you a criticism of an octavo in an epithet 
and a wink, and you can depend on it; cares for nobody except 
for the virtue there is in what he says ; delights in taking off big 
wigs and professional gowns, and in the disembalming and un- 
bandaging of all literary mummies. Yet he is as tender and 
reverential to all that bears the mark of genius, — that is, of a 
new influx of truth or beauty, — as a nun over her missal. In 
short, he is one of those men that know everything except how 
to make a living. Him would I keep on the square next my 
own royal compartment on life's chessboard. To him I would 
push up another pawn, in the shape of a comely and wise young 
woman, whom he would of course take, — to wife. For all 
contingencies I would liberally provide. In a word, I would, 
in the plebeian, but expressive phrase, "put him through" all 
the material part of life; see him sheltered, warmed, fed, but- 
ton-mended, and all that, just to be able to lay on his talk 
when I liked, — with the privilege of shutting it off at will. 

A Club is the next best thing to this, strung like a harp, with 
about a dozen ringing intelligences, 1 each answering to some 
chord of the macrocosm. They do well to dine together once in 
a while. A dinner-party made up of such elements is the last 
triumph of civilization over barbarism. Nature and art com- 
bine to charm the -senses; the equatorial zone of the system is 
soothed by well-studied artifices ; the faculties are off duty, and 
fall into their natural attitudes; you see wisdom in slippers and 
science in a short jacket. 

The whole force of conversation depends on how much you 
can take for granted. Vulgar chess-players have to play their 
game out; nothing short of the brutality of an actual checkmate 

1 The "Saturday Club," before referred to, answered as well to this descrip- 
tion as some others better known to history. Mathematics, music, art, the 
physical and biological sciences, history, philosophy, poetry, and other branches 
of imaginative literature were all represented by masters in their several realms. 
[Author's note.] 



6i6 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

satisfies their dull apprehensions. But look at two masters of 
that noble game! White stands well enough, so far as you can 
see; but Red says, Mate in six moves; — White looks, — nods; 

— the game is over. Just so in talking with first-rate men ; 
especially when they are good-natured and expansive, as they 
are apt to be at table. That blessed clairvoyance which sees 
into things without opening them, — that glorious license, 
which, having shut the door and driven the reporter from its 
keyhole, calls upon Truth, majestic virgin! to get down from 
her pedestal and drop her academic poses, and take a festive 
garland and the vacant place on the medius lectus, 1 — that 
carnival-shower of questions and replies and comments, large 
axioms bowled over the mahogany like bomb-shells from pro- 
fessional mortars, and explosive wit dropping its trains of 
many-colored fire, and the mischief-making rain of bon-bons 
pelting everybody that shows himself, — the picture of a truly 
intellectual banquet is one which the old Divinities might well 
have attempted to reproduce in their — 

— " Oh, oh, oh ! " cried the young fellow whom they call John, 

— "that is from one of your lectures!" 

I know it, I replied, — I concede it, I confess it, proclaim it. 

"The trail of the serpent is over them all!" 

All lecturers, all professors, all schoolmasters, have ruts and 
grooves in their minds into which their conversation is perpet- 
ually sliding. Did you never, in riding through the woods of a 
still June evening, suddenly feel that you had passed into a 
warm stratum of air, and in a minute or two strike the chill 
layer of atmosphere beyond? Did you never, in cleaving the 
green waters of the Back Bay, — where the Provincial blue- 
noses are in the habit of beating the "Metropolitan" boat- 
clubs, — find yourself in a tepid streak, a narrow, local gulf- 
stream, a gratuitous warm-bath a little underdone, through 
which your glistening shoulders soon flashed, to bring you back 
to the cold realities of full-sea temperature? Just so, in talking 
with any of the characters above referred to, one not unfre- 
quently finds a sudden change in the style of the conversation. 
The lack-lustre eye, rayless as a Beacon Street door-plate in 
August, all at once fills with light; the face flings itself wide 
1 Place of honor at a feast. 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 617 

open like the church-portals when the bride and bridegroom 
enter; the little man grows in stature before your eyes, like 
the small prisoner with hair on end, beloved yet dreaded of 
early childhood; you were talking with a dwarf and an imbe- 
cile, — you have a giant and a trumpet-tongued angel before 
you ! — Nothing but a streak out of a fifty-dollar lecture. — 
As when, at some unlooked-for moment, the mighty fountain- 
column springs into the air before the astonished passer-by, — 
silver-footed, diamond-crowned, rainbow-scarfed, — from the 
bosom of that fair sheet, sacred to the hymns of quiet batra- 
chians at home, and the epigrams of a less amiable and less 
elevated order of reptilia in other latitudes. 

— Who was that person that was so abused some time since 
for saying that in the conflict of two races our sympathies nat- 
urally go with the higher? No matter who he was. Now look 
at what is going on in India, — a white, superior " Caucasian" 
race, against a dark-skinned, inferior, but still "Caucasian" 
race, — and where are English and American sympathies? We 
can't stop to settle all the doubtful questions; all we know is, 
that the brute nature is sure to come out most strongly in the 
lower race, and it is the general law that the human side of 
humanity should treat the brutal side as it does the same nature 
in the inferior animals, — tame it or crush it. The India mail 
brings stories of women and children outraged and murdered; 
the royal stronghold is in the hands of the babe-killers. Eng- 
land takes down the Map of the World, which she has girdled 
with empire, and makes a correction thus: Delhi. Dele. The 
civilized world says, Amen. 

: — Do not think, because I talk to you of many subjects 
briefly, that I should not find it much lazier work to take each 
one of them and dilute it down to an essay. Borrow some of my 
old college themes and water my remarks to suit yourselves, as 
the Homeric heroes did with their melas oinos, — that black, 
sweet, syrupy wine which they used to alloy with three parts 
or more of the flowing stream. [Could it have been melasses, 
as Webster and his provincials spell it, — or Molossa's, as dear 
old smattering, chattering, would-be-College-President, Cotton 
Mather, has it in the Magnolia ? Ponder thereon, ye small 
antiquaries who make barn-door-fowl flights of learning in 
Notes and Queries! — ye Historical Societies, in one of 



618 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

whose venerable triremes I, too, ascend the stream of time, 
while other hands tug at the oars ! — ye Amines 1 of parasitical 
literature, who pick up your grains of native-grown food with a 
bodkin, having gorged upon less honest fare, until, like the 
great minds Goethe speaks of, you have "made a Golgotha" 
of your pages ! — ponder thereon !] 

— Before you go, this morning, I want to read you a copy of 
verses. You will understand by the title that they are written 
in an imaginary character. I don't doubt they will fit some 
family-man well enough. I send it forth as "Oak Hall" 2 pro- 
jects a coat, on a priori grounds of conviction that it will suit 
somebody. There is no loftier illustration of faith than this. 
It believes that a soul has been clad in flesh; that tender par- 
ents have fed and nurtured it; that its mysterious compages 
or frame-work has survived its myriad exposures and reached 
the stature of maturity; that the Man, now self -determining, 
has given in his adhesion to the traditions and habits of the 
race in favor of artificial clothing; that he will, having all the 
world to choose from, select the very locality where this auda- 
cious generalization has been acted upon. It builds a garment 
cut to the pattern of an Idea, and trusts that Nature will model 
a material shape to fit it. There is a prophecy in every seam, 
and its pockets are full of inspiration. — Now hear the verses. 

THE OLD MAN DREAMS 

for one hour of youthful joy! 
Give back my twentieth spring! 

1 'd rather laugh a bright-haired boy 

Than reign a gray-beard king! 

Off with the wrinkled spoils of age! 

Away with learning's crown! 
Tear out life's wisdom-written page, 

And dash its trophies down! 

One moment let my life-blood stream 

From boyhood's fount of flame! 

Give me one giddy, reeling dream 

Of life all love and fame! 
>jCH 



1 The reference is to a ghoul in the Arabian Nights' Entertainment. 

2 Then the name of a ready-made clothing store in Boston. 



THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE 619 

— My listening angel heard the prayer 
And calmly smiling, said, 

"If I but touch thy silvered hair, 
Thy hasty wish hath sped. 

"But is there nothing in thy track 
To bid thee fondly stay, 
While the swift seasons hurry back 
To find the wished-for day?" 

— Ah, truest soul of womankind! 
Without thee, what were life? 

One bliss I cannot leave behind: 
I'll take — my — precious — wife! 

— The angel took a sapphire pen 
And wrote in rainbow dew, 

"The man would be a boy again, 
And be a husband too!" 

— "And is there nothing yet unsaid 
Before the change appears? 

Remember, all their gifts have fled 
With those dissolving years!" 

Why, yes; for memory would recall 

My fond paternal joys; 
I could not bear to leave them all; 

I '11 take — my — girl — and — boys! 

The smiling angel dropped his pen, — 

"Why this will never do; 
The man would be a boy again, 

And be a father too!" 

And so I laughed, — my laughter woke 

The household with its noise, — 
And wrote my dream, when morning broke 

To please the gray-haired boys. 



READING LISTS 

[In general, the least difficult and least bulky are listed first.] 

I. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

Works 
i. Autobiography. 

2. Poor Richard's Sayings. 

3. Bagatelles (" The Whistle," " Proposed New Version of the 

Bible," "The Ephemera," etc.). 

Biography 

4. Morse, J. T., Jr., Benjamin Franklin. 

5. Parton, James, Benjamin Franklin. 2 vols. 

Interpretation 

6. Wendell, Barrett, A Literary History of America. 

7. More, P. E., Shelburne Essays, Fourth Series. 

8. Sainte-Beuve, C. A., English Portraits; or Causeries du Lundi, 

tome septieme. 

II. WASHINGTON IRVING 

Works 

1. Knickerbocker's History of New York. 

2. Sketch Book: 

"The Spectre Bridegroom." 
"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." 
" Stratford-on-Avon." 
"Little Britain." 

3. The Alhambra. 

Biography 

4. Payne, W. M., Leading American Essayists. 

5. Warner, C. D., Washington Irving. 

6. Irving, P. M., Life artd Letters of Washington Irving. 4 vols. 

Interpretation 

7. Trent, W. P., A History of American Literature. 

8. Thackeray, W. M., Roundabout Papers ("Nil Nisi Bonum"). 

9. Haweis, H. R., American Humorists. 



! 



622 READING LISTS 

III. JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 

Works 

i. The Last of the Mohicans. 

2. The Spy. 

3. The Pilot. 

4. The Deerslayer. 

5. The Prairie. 

Biography 

6. Erskine, John, Leading American Novelists. 

7. Lounsbury, T. R., James Fenimore Cooper. 

8. Phillips, Mary E., James Fenimore Cooper. . 

Interpretation 

9. Mark Twain, How to Tell a Story. 

10. Howe, M. A. de W., American Bookmen. 

11. Brownell, W. C, American Prose Masters. 

IV. EDGAR ALLAN POE 

Works 

1. The following Tales: - 

"The Gold Bug." 

"A Descent into the Maelstrom." 

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue." 

"The Pit and the Pendulum." 

"The Black Cat." 

"Ligeia." 

"The Fall of the House of Usher." 

"The Assignation." 

"Eleonora." 

2. "The Philosophy of Composition." 

Biography 

3. Woodberry, G. E., Edgar Allan Poe. 

4. Woodberry, G. E., The Life of Edgar Allan Poe. 2 vols. 

5. Harrison, J. A., The Life and Letters of Edgar Allan Poe. 2 vols. 

6. Lauvriere, E., Edgar Poe, Sa vie et son ceuvre. 

Interpretation 

7. Gates, L. E., Studies and Appreciations. 

8. Trent, W. P,, Longfellow and Other Essays. 

9. Gosse, Edmund, Questions at Issue. 

10. Brownell, W. C, American Prose Masters. 



READING LISTS 623 



V. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 

Works 

1. Scarlet Letter. 

2. The House of the Seven Gables. 

3. The Blithedale Romance. 

4. The Marble Faun. 

5. American Note-Books. 

6. Twice-Told Tales: 

"The Gentle Boy." 
"Dr. Heidegger's Experiment." 
"The Ambitious Guest." 
"The Gray Champion." 
"The Minister's Black Veil." 
"The Great Carbuncle." 
"The Threefold Destiny." 

7. Mosses from an Old Manse: 

"The Birthmark." 

"Feathertop." 

"The New Adam and Eve." 

"Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent." 

"The Artist of the Beautiful." 

Biography 

8. Erskine, John, Leading American Novelists. 

9. Woodberry, G. E., Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

10. James, Henry, Jr., Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

Interpretation 

11. Gates, L. E., Studies and Appreciations. 

12. More, P. E., Shelburne Essays, First Series. 

13. More, P. E., Shelburne Essays, Second Series. 

14. Stephen, Leslie, Hours in a Library, vol. 1. 

15. Brownell, W. C, American Prose Masters. 



VI. RALPH WALDO EMERSON 
Works 

Nature, Addresses, and Lectures: 
"Nature." 
"The Transcendentalist." 






624 READING LISTS 

2. Essays, First Series: 

"History." 
"Friendship." 
"Prudence." 
"Heroism." 

3. Essays, Second Series: 

"The Poet." 

"Character." 

"Manners." 

4. Representative Men: 

"Uses of Great Men." 
"Shakespeare." 

5. English Traits. 

6. Society and Solitude: 

"Society and Solitude." 
"Books." 

7. Miscellanies: 

"War." 

"Abraham Lincoln." 

8. Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson. 2 vols. 

Biography 

9. Payne, W. M., Leading American Essayists. 

10. Woodberry, G. E., Ralph Waldo Emerson 

11. Garnett, Richard, Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

12. Holmes, O. W., Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

13. Cabot, J. E., Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 2 vols. 

14. Emerson, E. W., Emerson in Concord. 

15. Firkins, 0. W., Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

Interpretation 

16. Arnold, Matthew, Discourses in America. 

17. Chapman, J. J., Emerson and Other Essays. 

18. James, Henry, Jr., Partial Portraits. 

19. James, William, Memories and Studies. 

20. Francke, Kuno, German Ideals of To-Day. 

21. Grimm, F. H., Fiinfzehn Essays, Erste Folge. 

22. Schmidt, J., Neue Essays. 

23. Maeterlinck, Maurice, Le tresor des humbles. 

24. Brownell, W. C, American Prose Masters. 

25. Santayana, George, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. 

26. Harrison, J. S., The Teachers of Emerson. 



READING LISTS 625 

VII. HENRY DAVID THOREAU 

Works 

1. W alien: 

"Economy." 
"Sounds." 
"The Bean-Field." 
"The Village." 
"Higher Laws." 
"Brute Neighbors." 

2. Miscellanies: 

"A Plea for Captain John Brown." 

3. Excursions: 

"Walking." 
"Autumnal Tints." 
"Wild Apples." 

4. Familiar Letters. 

5. Maine Woods. 

6. Journal, any vol. 

Biography 

7. Payne, W. M., Leading American Essayists. 

8. Salt, H. S., Life of Henry David Thoreau. 

9. Sanborn, F. B., Henry D. Thoreau. 

Interpretation 

10. Emerson, R. W., Lectures and Biographical Sketches. 

11. Torrey, Bradford, "Introduction" to the Journal, Walden 

Edition. 

12. Burroughs, John, Indoor Studies. 

13. Stevenson, R. L., Familiar Studies of Men and Books. 

14. More, P. E., Shelburne Essays, First Series. 

15. More, P. E., Shelburne Essays, Fifth Series. 

VIII. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

Works 

1. Letters. 

2. Prose Works, Riverside Edition, vol. 1: 

"A Moosehead Journal." 

" Cambridge Thirty Years Ago." 

3. Prose Works, vol. 2: 

"Carlyle." 

"Rousseau and the Sentimentalists." 



626 READING LISTS 

4. Prose Works, vol. 3 : 

"Dryden." 

"My Garden Acquaintance." 

"On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners." 

5. Prose Works, vol. 4: 

"Pope." 

"Milton." 

"Spenser." 

" Wordsworth." 

6. Prose Works, vol. 5 : 

"Abraham Lincoln." 

7. Prose Works, vol. 6: 

"Harvard Anniversary." 

" The Place of the Independent in Politics." 

Biography 

8. Greenslet, Ferris, James Russell Lowell, His Life and Work. 

9. Scudder, H. E., James Russell Lowell, a Biography. 2 vols. 

10. Hale, E. E., Lowell and His Friends. 

11. Wendell, Barrett, Stelligeri. 

Interpretation 

12. James, Henry, Jr., Essays in London and Elsewhere. 

13. Woodberry, G. E., Makers of Literature. 

14. Pollak, G., International Perspective in Criticism. 

15. Reilly, J. J., Lowell as a Critic. 

16. Brownell, W. C, American Prose Masters. 

IX. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

Works 

1. The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 

2. Elsie Venner. 

Biography 

3. Morse, J. T., Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes. 2 vols. 

4. Higginson, T. W., Old Cambridge. 

5. Howells, W. D., Literary Friends and Acquaintance. 

Interpretation 

6. Crothers, S. M., Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Autocrat and his 

Fellow Boarders. 

7. Lang, Andrew, Adventures among Books. 

8. Stephen, Leslie, Studies of a Biographer, vol. 2. 



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